B2B Software Marketing Tips & Tricks
3 Reasons Why Your Website is Ruining Your Chances with Prospects
Nowadays, a company’s website is like its “front door” to the vast majority of consumers. It’s a living document, one that needs to reflect well on the business behind it. In fact, a website’s appearance and functionality can attract customers to an organization — or send them running for cover.
How to Build An Authentic, Compelling, and Story-driven B2B Brand
If you haven’t heard much about this topic yet, get ready. The pendulum of marketing trends is swinging back from revenue & lead-driven demand generation towards branding. You’re going to hear all sorts of “marketing” people telling you that you need to focus time, money, and energy on creating a brand. But, the truth is simply this: you can’t really create a brand.
Why Successful Marketing Engines Focus On More than Lead Generation
Eighty-five percent of B2B marketers say lead gen is their single most important goal. That’s unfortunate. Believe it or not, marketing has never been about generating leads. It’s all about growth. In fact, 83 percent of global CEOs believe that marketing should be responsible for almost all of their company’s growth agenda. In other words, CEOs don’t want marketing to produce leads; they want growth. And these two objectives are held together by the most fragile of threads.
Data Privacy is the Future & The Cookie Monster is On A Diet
As we all step gently into the new age of data privacy and consumer trust, traditional methods of data collection, attribution, and personalization are changing. Both businesses and marketers are struggling to adjust.
The only thing more terrifying than trying to navigate through this new privacy-centric era is attempting to find your way forward. What’s next? How do you adjust? And, better yet, how do you find value in personalization and data privacy simultaneously?
Three Levels of Mastery: The Lost Art of Tradecraft in Marketing
Instead of focusing on providing experience and training to junior marketing professionals through mentorship, most businesses rely on college credentials and past work experience. But, there are definitely some lessons we should learn from master tradecraft pros that take on the responsibility of teaching that craft to the next generation of masters.
Is Gated Content Really the Right Strategy for Lead Generation?
As we embrace a new, fast-paced, customer-centric B2B ecosystem, it’s time to take a hard look at gated content. Is it really boosting revenues? Are the leads worth it? Does gated content work for everyone? And, most importantly, how does gated content impact your overall value, customers, and brand?
B2B Marketing Trends to Watch in 2021
2021 is upon us, and with a new year comes a new approach to your B2B marketing strategy. Unfortunately for all of us, the impacts of and uncertainty from COVID-19 still linger, and this as well as larger trends will force more adjustments to your approach to marketing your software this year. Buckle in, because it’s going to be an interesting ride!
8 Major Misconceptions About B2B Marketing
What if marketing isn’t just about securing leads, driving sales, and statistic-laden blog posts? Here are 8 common misconceptions about marketing that you need to avoid. Get ready to rethink everything you thought you knew about the constantly overused and sometimes abused word “marketing.”
How to Create B2B Case Studies That Actually Help Close Deals – Part 2
Preparation is the key to effective B2B case studies. Your case study writers need to do their homework! Talk to the account managers before you interview the customers. ALWAYS prepare the questions and share them with the customers well before the interview. Find out more about how to interview customers, what you need in a B2B case study writer and why format and design are SO important.
How to Create B2B Case Studies That Actually Help Close Deals – Part 1
B2B case studies help close sales because your clients are telling prospects how your software solved their problems and delivered measurable results. In this post, we look at how B2B buyers and prospects assess software providers and what makes B2B case studies believable and credible. We’ll also share tips on how to select customers for your case study and how to get customers to go public about their relationship with your company in a case study.
4 B2B Marketing Strategies for Niche/Enterprise Software Products
For niche companies in the oh-so-competitive B2B software marketplace, the vast majority of marketing tips don’t plug-and-play with your customers without some tweaks. Read more for the 4 marketing strategy tips we recommend.
Why You Should Consider Fractional Event Management
Business is becoming increasingly competitive. You already know that conferences, trade shows, and fairs help boost your business’s visibility. What you might not know is that hiring the perfect event manager is often just the thing needed to give your business the edge and help your brand outshine your competitors.
What to Do When Your Marketing Message Sucks (and You Know It)
Ah, the marketing message. Done right, it can be a godsend for your company. Done wrong, it can be a source of endless ridicule and frustration.
Stop Passing Crappy B2B Software Leads to your Sales Team
Let’s face it — marketing likes big numbers. All visitors to a company’s website and fill out a form go to the company’s sales team. Most of these leads won’t pan out and you’re wasting your sales team’s time. Having specializations for your sales team can help or you can hire a company to monitor these leads.
Holding Marketing Accountable for Your Revenue & Profitability Goals
Companies, big and small, often allocate a big budget to their marketing campaigns, thinking they have to spend money to make money. And as technology has evolved, it would now be a sin to start a marketing campaign without properly setting up tracking first.
Turning Information from Virtual Meetings and Events into Valuable On-Demand Content
One of the interesting things about many businesses is how repurposing content and information from virtual events to create on-demand content is often overlooked.
Creating B2B Case Studies That Actually Close Deals
Kara Kuryllowicz, a foremost expert & professional case study writer, joins us on the B.S. podcast to share tips & tricks for creating customer case studies that actually help you close sales deals. Learn what goes into a good customer case study, how to get your customers to agree to participate, and the kinds of information you need to include to write a case study that will help you close deals.
Picking the Right Event Management Software
Technology is now the key to planning successful events and meetings. As the reliance on technology grows, you can now simplify an otherwise mostly manual process using event management software. It saves time, helps prove event success, and provides increased data and analytics.
Why You Need to Invest in Content Marketing – Part 2
We had so much fun with Roya Rodeick, that we had enough for another podcast! We continue our conversation with some insight into the cardinal sins of content marketing, how to think about performance goals, the basic idea behind content marketing and what exactly it does for your business (spoiler alert… it’s not supposed to generate sales leads)and whether or not to require people to fill out a form to access your content.
Why You Need to Invest in Content Marketing – Part 1
Roya Rodeick joins us on the BSin’ with B.S. podcast to talk through all things content marketing for the software industry. We talk about what works, what doesn’t, the importance of thought leadership, how content creation helps drive traffic to your website, and the need to balance customer-focused work with content production for your business.
Email Marketing – Does It Really Even Work Anymore?
There was a time when email marketing was the go-to method for generating sales. Today, many business owners are looking at email marketing and asking themselves, does email marketing even work anymore?
The answer isn’t as simple as a plain yes or no. It really depends on what you want to accomplish with your email marketing program.
So, What Do You Do with Your 2020 Events Budget?
Not being able to host or attend the in-person events that you were anticipating when you planned your annual budget may have you wondering what to officially do with your 2020 events budget.
5 Things to Keep in Mind When You are Just Getting Started with Content Marketing
Content marketing is extremely important to your business’s future success. High-quality content marketing helps: Establishes a trusting relationship between you and your target market Drastically
When the Best Marketing in the World Cannot Help You
Marketing can work wonders for many B2B software companies, but it is not always a magic bullet. However, sometimes the real issue with the business is more profound, and marketing alone cannot help. In such cases, increasing the sales and marketing budget is just burning money. Read on to find out the signs, instances, and problems that even the best marketing strategies cannot fix.
Why You Need to Start Thinking of Marketing as Future-Proofing Your Software Business
While many businesses focus marketing goals and ROI calculations on short-term yields such as the number of leads, it is necessary to set a mixture of short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals. Marketing is not something that happens overnight and must be prioritized as a long-term strategy, which can be difficult when you’re not seeing results. You can’t treat it like sales with a pipeline and deals. You have to treat it like a 401k. Sure, you’ll see some immediate gains, but in reality, plan for your investment there to compound and grow over time (probably several years).
The Rising Need for Fractional CMOs in Tech
Every revenue dollar matters, especially as the global economy continues to face struggles. As the owner or operator of a tech company, it’s up to you to achieve your revenue objectives while keeping your operations are as lean as possible. One of the best ways to achieve this goal is to hire a fractional CMO.
Tales of Woe from Habitually Inconsistent Salespeople
There are a number of external forces that can cause underperformance for your sales team. Most sales people hold themselves accountable, but eventually you’ll run across a consistent underperformer who always has an excuse. These excuses usually share one common theme: blaming someone else.
B2B Software User Conference DIY
Shannon Albright joins us on the pod this week to chat all about building your software company’s first user conference from the ground up. Hear all about who needs to be involved, where to host it, how much it’s going to cost, things you’ll need to watch out for, and other super handy tips.
Know Your Audience: How B2B Marketing Compares to B2C
The common narrative that B2B and B2C campaigns should be strategized similarly is false and could be costing your business thousands in wasted marketing dollars. To understand why, marketers must have a solid understanding of how consumer businesses differ from their B2B counterparts.
3 Signs It May Be Time to Start Investing in Marketing for your Software Business
Marketing is arguably one of the most important functions of your business – and should be treated as such. However, not all companies should jump straight into investing thousands on a marketing budget.
B2B Software Companies & the Entrepreneurial Spirit
Alan Gunn brings some Southern charm to the Brand Syntax podcast with tips for entrepreneurs in the B2B software space. Hear from this 30-year software industry vet about the things you need to watch out for as you start to grow & scale your business.
Making Waves: Why Marketing is About Creating Momentum
At its very core, marketing isn’t about generating revenue, or leads, or customer satisfaction — those are just outcomes. Really good marketing is a long term investment, and it’s focused on building momentum in your industry. On a foundational level, momentum is the single biggest factor in the success of a company’s marketing program. Patience and persistence is vital to this process, experimentation is critical, and having a healthy mix of marketing channels/programs is the only way to achieve sustainable goals without backsliding.
Everything You Should Know – And Do – When Hosting An Online Event
Virtual meetings and events enable remote teams and support global companies, providing unique opportunities to engage with customers and colleagues no matter where they are in the world.
Building a B2B Sales Team at Scale
Amber Witherbee joins us this week to talk about the trials, tribulations, and lessons learned from scaling her B2B sales team from 2 to almost 50 in under 2 years. Tune in to hear from this 17+ year sales leader about how critical it is to have sales enablement & training and the things you should keep in mind as a business as you look to scale your sales/marketing team.