"The Growth Blog" - A resource for B2B Business leaders & marketers

This article was originally posted on the databox blog.

It’s commonly quoted that B2B buyers have access to unlimited information at their digital fingertips so they aren't contacting vendors until they are 70% of the way along the purchase process. Are they really waltzing happily through their purchase process without the need for marketing information and sales calls?

This article was originally posted on the kapost blog and we love it!

Dear wise and illustrious CMO,

We know you’re busy. You’re rushing from meeting to meeting all day every day making sure that everything we do drives the strategic messaging of our company forward. You’re our fearless leader and we’re lucky to have you. But if you have a minute, here’s some thoughts on marketing leadership we think you'd find valuable.

This article was originally posted on the Spyralitics Performance Marketing Blog.

B2B Marketing budgets in Australia are being negotiated right now, as we get ready for the start of the new fiscal year. What are you doing about your content marketing in 2018?

New marketing tactics and technologies continually emerge from the digital woodwork. Marketers must constantly balance the adoption of industry innovations with their ability to accurately gauge and value their effectiveness.  

The following post is a Q&A with analyst and subject-matter expert, Jennifer Polk, conducted by Gartner to promote their 2018 Digital Marketing Conference.

If you are a B2B salesperson you might be rather worried about some of the research data that's being widely quoted by "the experts."  Here is a selection:

• "Customers rate the salesperson as the least influential interaction in the buying process" - Gartner
• "Death of the B2B salesperson: 93% of buyers say they prefer buying online rather than from a salesperson" - Forrester
• "57% of the buyer's journey is complete before a customer's first contact with supplier" - Corporate Executive Board
• "67% of the buyer's journey is now done digitally" - Sirius Decisions

Salespeople would be forgiven for thinking they'll all be out of work in a few short years! Yet the reality is nothing is further from the truth.

But there's a catch...

If you’re selling complex or high-value B2B products or services, you’ve probably used Return on Investment (ROI) calculations to justify your value proposition and proposal. You may well market your offerings on the basis of the improved ROI you believe your target customers can generate.

But even when presenting to your prospects with a compelling ROI-based argument the chances are that you still won’t win the deal - and it’s not just because (even though it’s undoubtedly true) many buyers don’t trust the ROI calculations that vendors come up with.

Just when you thought you understood SEO...How you get ranked by the search engines has changed...

Again...

And this time its a big change which has some significant implications for B2B Marketers. The way you design your site, your content and the keywords you chose will all need to change. The following article was published in September 2017 by HubSpot. 

Human search behaviors have changed, and so have the technologies used to interpret and serve up search results. Optimising blog content to rank for long-tail keywords is no longer the best way to rank in search engine results -- and your blog architecture has something to do with that.

In this blog post, we'll walk you through the ways search has changed, the scoop on topic clusters, and how pillar pages fit into the equation.

Marketing automation tools are the not-so-secret weapon for B2B marketers. It allows you to focus on thinking... designing and creating compelling lead generation campaigns, rather than the doing...as the automation software should do the grunt work for you.

Sounds great right? Well yes, but making a decision on which automation platform suits your needs best, requires some thinking and some research. Here is a list of topics to consider: