Howard Sewell
Meeting the Needs of the Self-Serve B2B Buyer
TweetLinkedInShareEmail Just when you thought B2B buyer habits couldn’t change more dramatically, along comes the COVID pandemic. The sudden, wholesale transition to remote work and virtual teams has only accelerated trends that were evident pre-COVID,...
Respect the Funnel: Why B2B Marketers Can’t Shortcut the Buyer Journey
TweetLinkedInShareEmail It’s a truism in B2B marketing that every buyer journey is unique and different, but, even then, and especially in the B2B tech space, almost every buyer progresses through 3 basic stages:1. awareness – becomes aware of the cate...
10 Uncomfortable B2B Marketing Realities
TweetLinkedInShareEmail Those of us responsible for designing and executing marketing campaigns for a living know that the pristine, glossy world of marketing as portrayed in analyst reports and vendor case studies doesn’t always align with the authent...
Why an ABM Pilot Campaign Might Be a Bad Idea
TweetLinkedInShareEmail When companies look to get started in Account-Based Marketing (ABM), the first step is very often a pilot campaign. On paper, the logic makes sense:* pick a handful of key accounts* execute an ABM campaign against those ac...
6 B2B Demand Generation Trends to Watch
TweetLinkedInShareEmail What trends will dominate the demand generation landscape in 2022? We asked the experts at Spear Marketing Group to chime in: “Digital fatigue is real. B2B marketers need to rethink digital-first strategies to better...
Why 46 Percent of LinkedIn Ads Fail
TweetLinkedInShareEmail Most B2B marketing benchmark reports are completely useless. That’s because either 1) the results were generated through surveys, which (as any reputable statistician will tell you) causes all sorts of data bias, and/or 2)...
8 Surprising B2B Use Cases for Chatbots
TweetLinkedInShareEmail If you ask most B2B marketers how they use chat platforms like Drift, the immediate answer would most likely be: converting Web visitors. And indeed, increasing Web engagement and Web conversion rates is still a primary us...
The Case for Allowing Personal Emails on Lead Gen Forms
TweetLinkedInShareEmail Should you allow prospects to enter a personal email address when they fill out lead gen forms? B2B marketers seem divided on the question. In a recent LinkedIn poll, almost half of the respondents (46%) indicated th...
10 Uncomfortable ABM Realities
TweetLinkedInShareEmail Account-based Marketing (ABM) continues to revolutionize the B2B marketing landscape, and, yet, if you ask 10 marketers (or even 10 “ABM Experts”) to define ABM and what constitutes an ABM campaign, you’d likely get 10 different...
10 Tough Questions to Evaluate Your Target Account List
TweetLinkedInShareEmail In a far-gone era, when demand generation was “direct marketing,” it was often said that for any campaign to be successful, the list was paramount. Do everything else right (message, offer, creative, etc.), the experts tol...
The Risks of Over-Reliance on Late-Stage Content
TweetLinkedInShareEmail Whatever demand gen channels you use to generate marketing leads, there’s value in always promoting a mix of content and other offers that span the entire buying cycle: early-stage, mid-stage, and late-stage. That’s not si...
Should I Use a Separate Domain for Marketing Emails?
TweetLinkedInShareEmail A client asks: “We’ve been told that we should use a separate and unique domain for email that’s different from our main Web domain. Is this something you’d recommend?” The most common business case for using a separate em...
Surprise: Most B2B Advertising Isn’t Good. Or Is It?
TweetLinkedInShareEmail A recent report by LinkedIn and research agency System1 found that the bulk of B2B advertising is ineffective. I’ve written elsewhere in this space about the sorry state of B2B creative in general, so the headline came as ...
9 Tips for a More Effective Email Newsletter
TweetLinkedInShareEmail In an era of Instagram, TikTok, and Clubhouse, few marketing channels are more “old school” than the humble email newsletter. And, yet, newsletters are still thriving as a B2B marketing channel, driven in part by data privacy re...
B2B Demand Generation Predictions for 2021
TweetLinkedInShareEmail 2020 was a year of change for marketers worldwide, much of it not for the best of reasons. Will B2B marketing, and demand generation in particular, revert to “normal” once the pandemic subsides and economic recovery kicks ...
How Quickly Should I Suspend or Delete Non-Responsive Leads?
TweetLinkedInShareEmail A client asks: How long should a lead be chronically non-responsive before they’re marked as “marketing suspended”? What best practices should we put in place? There are multiple, legitimate reasons to suspend or even delete no...
4 Ways to Measure ABM Success
TweetLinkedInShareEmail Given the business case on which most Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategies are founded – namely, that ABM increases opportunities and revenue from high-value accounts – the temptation for marketers is to measure the success ...
12 Questions – A Checklist for ABM Readiness
TweetLinkedInShareEmail Not every Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy starts from the same place. For some, it might be defining Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), buying personas and associated messages. For others, it’s identifying a target...
18 Common Features of a Best-in-Class Lead Nurture Program
TweetLinkedInShareEmail It wasn’t that long ago, when marketing automation first burst on the scene, that the height of lead nurture sophistication was the simple, automated sending of multiple, sequential emails. Today, advances in marketing technolog...
10 Things to Do When Marketing Spend is On Hold
TweetLinkedInShareEmail There’s plenty of debate online about the merits of marketing spend in a recession, but the reality is that many B2B firms are currently cutting back on large-scale investment. If your company is one of those scaling back ...