Howard Sewell
MDF Funds & How to Use Them
TweetLinkedInShareEmail In uncertain economic times, Market Development Funds (MDF) can be a precious resource for channel partners (resellers, distributors, ISVs) looking for budget to fund sales and marketing activity. Yet industry surveys repo...
The Rise of AI & Other B2B Predictions for 2023
TweetLinkedInShareEmail Each year, it seems there’s one topic that dominates marketing conversation, and 2023 is no exception. In recent weeks, AI technology, and in particular tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney, have forward-thinking marketers de...
How to Calculate Demand Gen Budget: A Rough Guide
TweetLinkedInShareEmail Budgeting season is here again, and demand marketers are not immune. How big does your demand gen budget need to be in order to support your organization’s revenue goals in the new year? Alternatively, is the budget ...
How Should I Market to Purchased Lists?
TweetLinkedInShareEmail A client asks:“What’s the best way to market to purchased lists like ZoomInfo? We have a debate between our marketing and sales teams on whether the best approach is marketing emails, sales outreach, or something else.&nbs...
Report: What’s Working in Email Marketing
TweetLinkedInShareEmail A new report: “What’s Working in Email Marketing: The Power of Aligning Strategies, Data & Content” details the strategies, technologies, and best practices that today’s email marketers are adopting in an era of data privacy...
The PESO Model & Your Demand Generation Strategy
TweetLinkedInShareEmail Public relations pros have been using the PESO Model for years by integrating Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned media strategies into a single campaign, to better establish authority, amplify reach, and improve results. Can ...
Have Live Webinars Outlived their Usefulness?
TweetLinkedInShareEmail Remember the days when watching your favorite TV show meant being in front of the television at a specific time on a specific day? Even for a boomer like me, those days are a distant memory. Why then, in a world of on-demand, st...
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 ...