Customer Engagement

There is an imbalance between content supply and content demand – organizations are spending tons of time and money generating content no one wants. Here are five tips for marketing leaders trying to rebalance their content generation efforts to ensure that key sales and marketing initiatives are fueled with the right kind of content.

Fully 60 to 70 percent of content churned out by B2B marketing departments today sits unused. This stark statistic underscores the urgent need for a content revolution in B2B organizations. The SiriusDecisions Content Model, a new framework introduced today by SiriusDecisions’ Summit 2013 event in San Diego, aims to help companies launch such a revolution. […]

If you want to start an interesting debate with a bunch of B2B marketing, sales and product folks, ask them what they think of the saying, “Nothing happens until somebody sells something.” With all the time and attention spent on what happens before anybody buys, it’s no surprise that there’s often not much energy left […]

In all this talk about the funnel (or waterfall) being dead, I’ve noticed an unsettling misunderstanding: How is it acceptable to tack on a single stage to the buying cycle, call it “the customer lifecycle,” and expect behavior to change? If the anti-funnel camp believes the buying view is too linear to reflect that process, […]

The third most important skill cited by EMEA CMOs was data and analytics. Some called it “intelligent analytics” while others talked about “contextualized decisionmaking.”

Raymond Carver’s 1981 book of short stories What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is a series of vignettes focusing on characters seeking to define and understand the true nature of love through conversation. The deeper the characters delve into attempts to articulate love, the more inarticulate they seem to become. The same […]

When we set out to evaluate the new breed of firm that we call "customer engagement agencies," we sent our initial screener to an incredibly long list of firms — over sixty, in fact! — ranging from MSPs to digital agencies to management consultancies. We felt that we needed to cast a wide net if […]

Something struck me the other night as I was creating some new content for an upcoming event I’m facilitating. So, I’m building content, and actually thinking about content itself as a topic area we have been thinking and talking about a lot lately as a research team. And here’s what struck me: Buyers don’t want content. Buyers want information.

What has changed is the nature of B2B marketing and its escalating requirements for product and demand content, which has given rise to the “trend” of content marketing. Content marketing is not trendy; it is already deeply embedded in the way that communications functions think and operate.

It seems we in B2B may have taken the concept of making marketing accountable for revenue a little too far. It’s not that I miss the “bad old days” when it was okay for marketing to not be accountable for any revenue outcome. But I see a disturbing trend: From measurement to social media to account-based marketing programs, marketers are pushed to focus almost exclusively on creating demand, at the expense of supporting customers.

Many companies claim that they are customer-centric, but few are really good at it. Often the problem is with the types of listening techniques we use to develop our customer understanding. In today’s dynamic, interconnected and increasingly digital market environments, traditional customer listening approaches are not effective on their own. As customer engagement continues moving […]

SiriusDecisions data shows the most trusted source of information for B2B buyers is their peers. The closest a marketer can come to delivering this source is a customer reference or evidence-based content. So if customer references are a fast track to trust and value, why is there so much mediocre reference content out there?

One way or another, everything comes back to the numbers, but sometimes we look right past the numbers that matter most. With so much of marketing’s focus on winning new customers, it’s easy to forget a simple financial truth. Companies grow faster and more profitably if they retain more of the customers they already have […]

During our recent Summit, I spoke with a marketing client to help him strategize about building a thought leadership program for his company’s professional services business unit. He clearly saw the value of using thought leadership content to boost inbound marketing and demand creation results. On the other hand, the head of the consulting practice […]

It’s a technology big idea: that organizations can best serve their customers, partners, and employees with new “systems of engagement.” (Thanks to Geoff Moore for permission to define and use his term.) Let us explain why. First, the logistics. John McCarthy and I spent the last eight months sifting through the patterns that have emerged from firms […]

It’s hard to avoid reading something about how “content is king” in B2B marketing right now, but what does that really mean and what are you supposed to do about it? It comes down to this fact: buyers are people too, and when we respond to B2B messages, it’s because something relevant or valuable to […]

With social media, it’s no longer a question of can you measure, but do you. And measurements that merely communicate the number of followers and fans, and how much they post, does little to demonstrate the impact social media is having on your marketing efforts.