Ardath Albee
Never Assume B2B Buyers Know How to Buy
One of the assumptions that marketers and sales reps make when people show interest in your website, content, or booth at a virtual summit or trade show is that they’re buyers. There’s nothing inherently wrong in this with the exception that the identi...
Put B2B Content in Context Across the Customer Lifecycle
Content marketing has been an ongoing practice for B2B marketers for more than a decade. Marketers are spending a boatload of money, time and effort producing and distributing content to their audiences. But for many buyers, the B2B content they encoun...
Is Your B2B Content Too BIG?
When I talk with clients about how to build a storyline across the entirety of the buying process, they often express hesitation… What will we write about that will be interesting over 6-month span (or longer)? How will we prove value when the end of…
Use B2B Buyer Persona Types for Ease and Effectiveness
In a lot of the conversations I have with B2B marketers, many are overwhelmed when confronted with how to build truly actionable buyer personas. Building actionable personas takes a fair bit of time and effort.It’s also because buying committees are ex...
How Many B2B Buyer Personas Do You Need?
One of the first things potential clients say to me is something along the lines of how many buyer personas they think they need to create. I’ve heard everything from one to fifty-two. The average is three to five B2B buyer personas.But even beyond the...
Inclusive Relevance: Your Content’s Job Description
A funny thing happened with the growth of information availability. Once B2B buyers figured out they could access whatever information they needed to understand a new subject, answer a question, or evaluate a product they no longer needed to talk to a ...
Buyer Context is the Key to Engagement
What do your B2B buyers’ see? Until you can see what they see, you cannot create the conditions for change. But once you understand buyer context, you can solve a problem in perspective that they didn’t recognize they have. Why does this matter? Becaus...
Content-Driven Conversations: The Future of B2B Engagement
Marketers say one of their biggest challenges is creating content that engages and compels their buyers. The future will not only depend on engagement, but on continuous, content-driven conversations that result in buying decisions in your favor. Buyer...
Achieving Maturity with Content Operations
I had to laugh when I thought about it. I’ve been actively involved in content marketing for 20 years. Seems like I just started. There’s something new to learn every day and content marketing feels like it’s taken over marketing. Well, essentially it...
Why Marketers Must Have Customer Conversations
Know your audience has become a rallying cry behind the concept of creating compelling buyer and customer experiences and becoming customer-centric companies. But how many B2B marketers can say they truly KNOW their customers? For those of you who know...
The Relevance Maturity Matrix Helps B2B Marketers Close the Gap
A good customer experience must be relevant. According to Forrester Principal Analyst Mary Shea, “Your buyers want contextual interactions with both human and digital assets across a holistic, but non-linear journey.” As I stated in my book, Digital Re...
B2B Tech Marketers Make the Shift From Funnels to Lifecycles
For SaaS and subscription companies, winning a customer is only the first step of the journey to customer lifetime value (LTV). This is why it’s imperative for B2B tech marketers to shift their focus from buying journey funnels to f...
SMS Messaging Moves Businesses Beyond Transactions
Text messaging in business is often thought of as purely transactional. It’s commonly used for password verification, appointment reminders, package delivery updates, service appointment arrival times, coupons and promotional offers—all of them transac...
How Content Performance Informs Your Marketing Strategy
As our ability to collect data grows, so do the different ways we can measure content performance. With that said, what I see most is that B2B marketers tend to stick to traditional vanity metrics rather than doing the work to rethink what we’re m...
Content Operations: Waiting is Costing You
The intent to expand content marketing strategy and tactics is in every B2B marketing survey. B2B marketers plan to create more content, spend more on content marketing, increase the number of channels for content distribution, and add more technology ...
How to Apply a B2B Buyer Persona to Your Content Marketing Strategy
In a previous post, I shared a four-step process for creating in-depth B2B buyer personas. In this post, I’ll discuss how the details of a buyer persona inform a content marketing strategy. With the wealth of information gained during the process of determining buyer personas,...
Create B2B Buyer Personas that Inform Content Marketing Strategy
89% of B2B marketers have embraced content marketing, only 37% have a documented content marketing strategy, and only 22% say they are extremely successful with their overall approach to content marketing. Successful content marketing requires more than just a commitment to creating content—it requires a developed,...
The Value of ABM Goes Beyond Marketing
Pushing product: it’s what B2B companies have been doing for years. Even if we say we’re putting the customer front and center, usually we’re not really walking the talk. We have all these meetings and mandates about what the company wants to accomplish and...
A Lack of Customer Advocacy Could Make B2B Buyers Walk Away
I was interviewing a client’s customer a few days ago for a persona project and something he said made me stop and think. What he said can be paraphrased as: If there is no buzz about your company online, I won’t consider your product as...
Content Marketing Operations Halts Random Acts of Content
One of the biggest values that come with content marketing operations maturity is the ability to say “no” to ad hoc content demands. As B2B marketers have adopted content marketing, many have found themselves on the hamster wheel of content production. Volume has become the...