Jim Williams
A Look Inside Our Most Ambitious B2B Marketing Campaigns Of 2016
January is the perfect time to review the past year’s ups and downs—both personally and professionally—to see how you can do better. To start 2017 off strong, we’re reviewing some of Influitive’s biggest B2B marketing campaigns from 2016 to see what went well and what...
The Year Of The Customer Marketer: The State Of Customer Marketing In 2017
In today’s uber-competitive business landscape, a positive customer experience can often be the difference between closing a new deal or retaining a customer—more so than product features or price. That’s why more companies are moving customer marketing higher up on their priority list. This role,...
The Messenger Is The Message: A New Era For B2B Content Marketing
B2B content marketing as we know it is broken. Only 30% of B2B marketers say their organizations are effective at content marketing, according to the 2016 B2B Content Marketing Benchmark Report. There are two main reasons for this: Most of your customers are suffering from…
Forrester Reveals New Way B2B CMOs Can Scale Company-wide Customer Obsession
CMOs know they need to get a handle on the customer experience—and fast. Without long-term engagement strategies that deliver the right content at the right moment to increase customer loyalty and delight, brands lose valuable customers and the chance to leverage positive customer sentiment to...
How Hubspot Sparked A Movement Behind Their Brand (Just Like Beyonce)
Never mess with the Beyhive. That was the advice of angel investor, VC, and former CMO of Hubspot, Mike Volpe, who kicked off the recent Advocacy Advantage roadshow in Boston on September 19, 2016. His main goal: illustrate the sheer power of fanatic, loyal advocates.…
Forrester Report: Customer Goodwill Is An Untapped Marketing Goldmine
We’ve long talked about how advocate marketing programs drive tangible revenue—and we’re not the only ones. Analysts at Forrester and Gartner have outlined how advocate marketing strategies can spark B2B growth by increasing leads, brand awareness, and customer retention. However, fear of failure still prevents...
Why Every Company Needs To Embrace Their Haters, According To Jay Baer
Companies are scrambling to find ways to improve the customer experience and keep their current users happy. However, many aren’t focusing on how handle the customers who turn on them after a slip up—usually by venting their frustrations on social media and review websites. While you may think these “haters”…
Forrester: Advocate Marketing Technology Key To Customer Engagement
Today’s leading B2B technology companies have one thing in common: they’re successfully engaging their customer advocates to build their brands and drive revenue (on both the retention and acquisition fronts). According to a new report from Forrester’s Vice President and Principal Analyst Laura Ramos, formal...
Infographic: 17 Stats About B2B Referrals You Should Know (But Probably Don’t)
Many marketers and salespeople intuitively believe that referrals are the best leads they can get, and that they generate new business more efficiently as a result. But to what degree is that true for B2B organizations? We teamed up with Heinz Marketing to survey more...
How CMOs Can Build Cross-Functional Relationships & Improve The Customer Experience
Gone are the days when a great product alone defined a company. Gartner states that by 2016, 89% of all organizations will be competing primarily on customer experience. Research shows that improving the customer experience leads to stronger customer loyalty—meaning customers will buy more, stay...
The Relationship Between Customer Engagement, Loyalty And Revenue
Marketers know that finding ways to increase customer engagement is good for the bottom line. “Customer engagement is highly correlated to customer loyalty,” says Aimee Lucas, Customer Experience Transformist and VP at the Temkin Group, a customer experience research and consulting firm. That’s because loyal...
Want To Be A Successful CMO? Here’s 4 Skills You Need To Have
The role of the CMO has undergone a massive transformation in just a few short years. It’s no longer about creating the next campaign, or choosing the most influential ad agency. From growing the sales pipeline to navigating a company’s transition into the digital world,...
How To Build A Top-Notch Customer Marketing Team In Your Organization
In earlier blog posts, David Coates, Senior Customer Marketing Manager at Iron Mountain, outlined his company’s unique approach to engaging customers, along with a framework for effective customer marketing. In this final post, David shares the ideal mix of experience and skills needed to build...
How Iron Mountain’s Customer Marketing Strategy Delivers 6-Figure Value
As more organizations realize the value and importance of having a customer-centric strategy, they are getting formal with marketing programs and initiatives tailored to existing customers. Iron Mountain—the industry leader in storage and information management services—is one such company. Since 2013, they have run a...
Report: Create A Better Online Community With Advocates
Since Influitive is an advocate marketing company, we know that advocates can increase your high-quality referral leads, act as strong sales references, and contribute to a higher customer lifetime value by coming back to purchase from you again and again. And we also understand how...
New Research: Only 6% Of Online Communities Meet Expectations
Behind every great brand is a thriving community. However, if you’re hearing crickets when you visit your company’s online community, you’re not alone. According to new research by Demand Metric, online communities are at risk of becoming “dead zones”—meaning they’re rarely visited and show no...
A Crucial Solution in the Attention Economy: Advocacy
Photo by @esmith_imagesThis blog was originally published on Relevance.com. Photo by @esmith_images Every day we deal with information overload, with brands vying for our attention everywhere we look. Buying attention doesn’t have a good return on investment: according to The Guardian, 86 percent of viewers skip TV advertising....
Why Marketers Ignore Your B2B Technology Pitch
Right now, we’re entering another Golden Age of Marketing. If you look at the most recent Marketing Technology LUMAscape, there are over 1,800 products and tools to help marketers do their job better than ever before. The beautiful thing is that most of them don’t...
How Marketers Can Build Trust During The Buying Process
Today’s expensive, complex B2B purchases are made by groups, not by individuals. According to the CEB, the average B2B decision-making group includes 5.4 buyers from a wide variety of roles, teams and locations, and that number continues to rise. Yet marketing and sales efforts still...
Move Over Leads: Customer Engagement, Retention And Advocacy Are The New Critical Contributors Impacting...
5 big trends for the future of customer marketing: New benchmark research from Influitive and Demand Metric Traditionally, customer marketing has been an under-funded, under-valued and under-appreciated function on the marketing team, especially compared to its counterparts such as demand generation and content marketing. Today,...