Customer Engagement

• B2B social media marketing often underdelivers due to missing strategic readiness elements
• Organizations that holistically and comprehensively develop a B2B social media strategy outperform their peers on social
• Performing a gap analysis against the following 10 readiness criteria and addressing weaknesses can improve your social media performance

• The customer marketing team is responsible for customer relationship nurture, messaging and enablement
• The customer success team executes strategies for increasing the value customers receive from products and services
• When these two functions work together to maximize customer engagement, great things happen

• Content marketing technology helps a specific department or an entire organization operationalize the content lifecycle
• Content marketing vendors vary in many ways, including solution basis (platform/points), third-party content availability and digital asset management
• This blog post summarizes the landscape for content marketing technology vendors

• Marketing teams are often burdened by manual processes for getting content reviewed and approved by stakeholders
• Most content marketing vendors have the ability to help manage workflows for the creation and review of content
• Adopting content marketing technology can help improve content operations and find bottlenecks in review processes

Do you know how your customers feel about their experiences with your firm? Customers’ emotions can damage — or improve — customers’ perception of the overall experience and your firm’s ability to grow. Customers’ emotions affect whether you’ll lose or keep them, whether they will buy more or less from you, and whether they will […]

• Marketing operations and content operations leaders need to think about three categories of measurement and insight
• The kitchen sink is the full set of metrics and insight feeds available to the measurement team for analysis
• The executive dashboard is a custom summary view anchored in the insights that inspired the measurement initiative to begin with

• Content operations is an essential role within B2B marketing organizations of all sizes
• There are four essential jobs that don’t get done in organizations lacking a content operations function
• These four jobs are the librarian, air traffic controller, inventory specialist and analyst

• The vast majority of B2B organizations fail to asses, analyze and improve the post-sale customer experience
• Building customer experience maps can help organizations invest in customer experience across the customer lifecycle
• Consider these three steps to get started on customer journey mapping

• B2B organizations adopt content marketing technology to manage ideation, streamline processes and manage the publication/distribution of content
• The ability of a content marketing system to support your image needs is an important consideration when evaluating these tools
• The adoption of content marketing technology can lower the barriers for companies to adopt more visual content in their communications

There’s a very large graveyard of failed CRM projects. There’s more CRM initiatives that have spiraled out of control to become multimillion-dollar investments that negatively affected large numbers of customer-facing employees and didnt deliver any real results.  The cost of poor CRM adoption is twofold: underutilized investment and unmet business objectives. We recently ran a […]

In the age of the customer, executives don’t decide how customer-centric their companies are — customers do. And while good customer experiences can help control costs, executives are more interested in the potential for sustainable top-line growth. Forrester defines CRM as: The business processes and supporting technologies that support the key activities of targeting, acquiring, retaining, […]

• Judging RFP responses is a critical step in the service provider selection process
• It is important to allocate adequate time to review RFP responses so that you’re not rushed in reviewing all of the documents
• Make sure to keep these five things in mind as you review RFP responses to get the most value from your efforts

• Customer intelligence management solutions help B2B companies collect, analyze and respond to customer feedback
• The maturity of customer relationships helps determine the value of intelligence
• Information on customers often resides in silos across the enterprise and isn’t shared

• Building RFPs for service providers can be a daunting and time-consuming task
• There are benefits in viewing the RFP as a tool to uncover more about the service provider’s approach and potential chemistry
• Evaluate your RFP through three lenses to attract the types of service providers you want to work with

• The implementation of best practices can often be hindered by cultural issues
• Successful modern B2B businesses are authentic, collaborative, audience-centric and digitally savvy
• Change in organization culture is a strategic imperative that must be acknowledged by everybody in the organization

• Collecting customer feedback is imperative for B2B organizations
• Many organizations struggle with how to integrate this customer intelligence into processes
• Customer intelligence management solutions can help companies with this, so long as process are altered as well

Why the continued focus on knowledge management? It’s because customers increasingly leverage web self-service as a first point of contact with a company. In 2014, web self-service was the most commonly used communication channel for customer service, exceeding phone use.  And good web self-service relies on a solid foundation on knowledge management. Companies are also […]

• We often see the terms “customer marketing” and “customer experience” used interchangeably
• This post clarifies the two terms and draws a line in the sand about their usage
• Customer experience is about strategy, while customer marketing is about using the toolkit of marketing to support goals

• With B2B companies pumping out so much content, you must ensure you are creating the right content for the right audiences
• Otherwise, you are just adding to the cacophony of content that is quickly becoming the standard for B2B Web experience
• In order to gain mindshare, leads and new customers, you cannot be all things to all people – and neither can your content!