David Crane
5 ABM Benefits of Synchronizing Programmatic with Lead Gen Campaigns
For B2B marketers, launching a successful ABM campaign comes with unique challenges. And while Gartner states 70% of B2B organizations have or plan to assemble account-based programs this year, ABM strategies often falter due to numerous siloed efforts. Siloed channels – especially programmatic and lead…
How To Measure Account-Based Marketing In 7 Easy Steps
In many ways, account-based marketing (ABM) has more in common with art than science. Success in ABM requires a great deal of personalized outreach, and because ABM is centered around human relationships, it can be challenging to measure the returns on account-based marketing campaigns.
How to Research and Evaluate the Latest Marketing Technology
"Sixty-five percent of marketing organizations say they plan to increase their spend on martech in the next year," according to the Walker Sands “State of Marketing Technology 2018.” Unfortunately, marketers may not always make strategy-driven choices about new technology as they struggle to keep pace…
Why Inbound Marketing Is Failing & What You Can Do About It
A version of this was article was previously published on CMSWire. Inbound marketing efforts play an important role in B2B marketing success. But inbound alone won’t achieve the goals being placed on most B2B marketing organizations today — for three reasons.
B2B Influencer Marketing: How to Be Effective Without Being Annoying
Influencers can smell a leech a mile away. If you launch into influencer marketing with the wrong tactics, you won't get a second chance. Many B2B marketers use a templated style of outreach through email or LinkedIn message which sounds something like this. "Hi, I…
B2B Marketing Trends: Why You Should Be Skeptical
You should pay attention to the hottest B2B marketing trends of 2018, but not for the reasons you might expect. You should be wary of them. We B2B marketers ruin everything. We jump on the bandwagon of new channels, tactics and tools, following the herd…
15 Tactics for Successful B2B Social Media Marketing
For 20% of B2B marketers, social media is one of the top three sources for qualified leads, according to the Chief Marketer B2B Lead Gen Outlook report. The role of social media in demand generation has evolved to encompass targeted lead generation, influencer outreach, lead…
Top-Funnel Demand Gen Inefficiencies: How Much Do They Cost Your Sales Pipeline?
A version of this post was originally published on CMSWire. B2B marketing teams are increasingly being evaluated on their contributions to the sales pipeline or even revenue. Understandably, demand-generation marketers have as a result focused more on optimizing down-funnel efforts rather than first fixing more…
4 Essentials of an Effective Integrated Marketing System
Though the idea sounds nice, B2B marketers simply can't rely on a single piece of software to capture end-to-end marketing processes. The marketing technology (MarTech) landscape is exploding with options, none of which fill every use case in the B2B marketing organization. Such use cases are…
Navigating the Changing B2B Marketing Landscape (Interview with Anand Thaker)
Anand Thaker is the CEO of IntelliPhi, an R&D and advisory firm working to evolve go-to-market decision making for growth leaders. He’s also a long-time MarTech industry and digital engagement expert, who’s accelerated firms in variety of operational, leadership and advisory roles among enterprises, growth startups…
Integrated B2B Marketing Efficiency: Reducing Wasted Budget
"Last quarters results were excellent, but can we get better results from the same budget this quarter?" Sound familiar? B2B marketers are experiencing increasing pressure to squeeze more performance from their marketing budgets. But, trying to get more and more mileage from the same spend…
5 Basic B2B Marketing Tactics That Deliver Big Results
A version of this post was originally published on CMSWire. I know far from everything about B2B marketing. However, over the past decade of yielding to the latest demand-gen “hacks,” content marketing trends and cutting-edge marketing tech, I’ve discovered a few rather basic activities will…
How Top Demand Generation Teams Increase Efficiency to Maximize ROI
Increasingly, demand generation program success is determined by sales-pipeline or revenue contribution. In fact, according to DemandGen Report’s 2018 Benchmark Survey Report, 28% of B2B marketing organizations have specific revenue-based quotas, a 5% year-over-year increase. Dialing up success was much easier just five years ago when B2B marketing programs…
Demand Generation vs. Inbound Marketing: What’s the Difference?
Let's be honest, the B2B marketing industry (and we marketers in general) are pretty bad at defining our terms and sticking to that terminology. Rather than being driven by clarity, our messaging, content and general communications is far more often a haphazard mix of trending…
B2B Demand Generation Content: Thought Leadership vs. SEO
Publishing B2B thought leadership content can have a significant impact on your demand generation strategy. It's a powerful tool for generating awareness, credibility, brand value and quality traffic. Over 80% of business decision-makers say thought leadership increased their trust in a vendor organization, according to…
7 Ways to Hit Home Runs With Content Marketing for Demand Generation
Content marketing is getting harder. A massive amount of branded content is being published to the web every day. Every piece makes it more difficult to capture and keep the attention of your target audience. Joe Pulizzi, Content Marketing Institute Founder, attributes this to the increasing difficulty…
The Rarely Talked About Benefits of Account-Based Marketing
Research clearly shows that a well-executed ABM strategy can generate significant lift for B2B marketing efforts. A study from the Altera Group found that 97% of B2B marketers report that ABM drives higher ROI than other marketing activities. By adopting a mindset of “account awareness,” where you…
GDPR’s Effect On Web Forms, Events, 3rd-Party Lead Gen, Channel Partners and Sales
The other week, I was asked to lead a discussion with the Houston Marketo User Group on how GDPR will affect B2B marketing. …well, to be honest, two other people were asked first, but they couldn’t make it, so the user group was stuck with…
The EU GDPR Compliance Checklist for B2B Marketing
Are you prepared to demonstrate compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by May 25, 2018? If your organization stores or processes data about European Union (EU) citizens, you’ll need to prove compliance or face steep fines up to €20 million. That’s about $24.81 million…
A 3-Tier Framework for Crafting a Winning Demand Generation Plan
There are a lot of moving parts in today's comprehensive demand generation strategies. And all signs indicate that as B2B marketing teams garner greater responsibilities within organizations, demand gen requirements will only expand. This complexity has created a need for demand orchestration frameworks and infrastructures that enable…