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The latest from Shake Marketing Group

B2B Marketing Articles
B2B Marketing Articles

  • How Strategy and Tactics Work Together for Marketing Success

    It's simple to talk about tactics and strategy as though they are interchangeable. Although there is a great deal of overlap and they are both crucial to monitor, the phrases shouldn't be used synonymously.

    Learn the key differences and why you need both strategy and tactics to be a successful b2b marketer.

  • Making the Right Career Choice: B2B or B2C Marketing, Which One is Right for You?

    Starting a career in marketing can be exciting, with so many options to choose from. However, it is important to make a wise choice, as the marketing world is divided into two main segments: B2C (business-to-consumer) and B2B (business-to-business).

  • How to Communicate Marketing's Value to Internal Stakeholders

    The Confident Marketer Playbook: Step 9

    A confident marketing leader takes ownership of their personal brand. Learn how to let others know what you've accomplished.

  • Bring Your Marketing Plan to Life. Build an Army To Execute.

    The Confident Marketer Playbook: Step 8

    You have your marketing plan, but how do you execute it? Learn how to build an army of resources to get your strategy going.

  • Making Content King (Steps to Create Your Content Strategy)

    The Confident Marketer Playbook: Step 7
    Creating a content strategy is a major aspect of every marketer's job. New content is put online all the time, so how do you stand out and make an impact?

  • Create a Value Proposition that Matters to Your Customers

    The Confident Marketer Playbook: Step 6
    If you don't communicate customer value, you'll lose the sale. Your message needs to tell your customer what they get and how that is a big deal for them. If customers don't believe in the value of your product, why would they buy it?

  • The Key to CEO Buy-In: How to Align Your B2B Marketing Strategy with Business Goals

    The Confident Marketer Playbook: Step 5

    CEOs complain that marketers don't understand their overall business goals. Learn how to align marketing goals with your company's mission.

  • Ideate Your Best Customers to Develop Customer Profiles

    The Confident Marketer Playbook: Step 4
    43% of companies do not have a defined ideal customer profile. This is a critical step to align sales and marketing...and make your content marketing and campaigns resonate.

  • How To Gain New Insights to Grow Your Business

    The Confident Marketer Playbook: Step 3
    Learn how to stay on top of changing customer demands and competitor shifts to gain a marketing edge.

  • 8 Steps to Reveal Gaps and Opportunities in your Marketing Strategy

    The Confident Marketer Playbook: Step 2
    When is the last time you did a marketing 'health check'? A consistent and comprehensive marketing health check (or audit) is a great way to figure out what's working and what's not.

  • Develop the Mindset of a B2B Marketer (Hint: Think Confidence)

    The Confident Marketer Playbook: Step 1
    Strengthen your mindset to be a relevant, confident and influential marketer. Marketing is more than just know-how. It's about how you show up.

  • How to Retain Customers During Uncertain Times
    If there's one thing companies should focus on during times of uncertainty, it's how to stay relevant to their customers. Companies that obsess over their customers are able to offer 'value' in the form of new and appropriate solutions ...
  • How To Create an Effective B2B Marketing Strategy
    One of the biggest complaints that I hear from b2b marketers is that they often feel like ‘order takers’. Whether your CEO is constantly coming up with new ideas to execute, or the sales team needs help to create personalized customer-facing content, it’s ...
  • Advice to CEO’s: Empower Your Marketing Team to Think and Work Strategically

    Empowering your team is challenging for CEOs of scaling businesses. However, strategic marketing is essential to success. Read why and learn how.

  • Make These Three Shifts To Gain Massive Credibility as a B2B Marketer
    You enter the business world eager to prove yourself and build a dream marketing career. But it quickly becomes apparent that everyone, and I mean everyone has an opinion about marketing. After several months or years you lose confidence and enthusiasm for...
  • 3 Ways to Drive a Better Customer Experience

    To meet your customer’s rising expectations – you have to have a deep understanding of your customer. Here are three ways to get to know your customers better.

  • 5 Key Competencies Every Marketer Must Master to Stand Out

    There’s a lot of talk about what it takes to be a top marketer.

    There’s a long list of hard skills like Content creation, data analytics, SEO, social media, etc.

    Then there’s a list of so-called ‘soft’ skills like agility, collaboration and listening.

  • How to Get a Handle on Your Competiton

    It is impossible to be at the top of your game without first understanding what you are up against.

    In order to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage in the market, you need to conduct a thorough analysis of your competition. Here's how.

  • Creating content that matters
    If you ask a marketer if they are creating content, there’s a 99% chance that they’d say “yes”. If you’re a marketer yourself, you know how much content you’re pushing out every day. From newsletters, blog posts, articles, social media posts to videos, pre...
  • 5 Steps to Create a Powerful Value Proposition
    If you’ve been in B2B marketing or sales for the last few years, you’ve definitely noticed some changes – longer and more complex sales cycles, more buyers involved in the decision-making process, and more buyers coming to your organization with a clear id...
  • How to Stay Relevant To Your Customers During Uncertain Times
    The talk about being “customer-focused” is everywhere in the business world. It’s a term we hear frequently and there’s hardly any successful company — regardless of industry, type, or size — that doesn’t describe itself as customer-focused. The question i...
  • What B2B Marketers Are Missing By Skipping Customer Research (And How To Do It Right)
    When I say “research”, what comes to your mind? If you're like most B2B Marketers, you probably thought "ugh!"In talking with my clients, I’ve noticed what seems to be a trend among B2B companies. Most aren't doing ‘real’ customer resea...
  • Stop Selling and Start Listening
    Of all the emails I receive in my inbox every day, only 10% are either work-related or from family and friends. The remaining 90%? You guessed it: Cold outreach emails from salespeople. Normally, I just delete such emails—most of those still unread when I ...
  • The Most Obvious Marketing Mistake – Selling on Features
    I recently made a trip to Home Depot to buy a replacement light bulb for my bedside lamp.On any given year, I spend 0% of my time thinking about light bulbs. I’ve never googled “the best light bulbs”, nor read any product reviews about light bulbs, nor ask...
  • Speak My Language: Why B2B Marketing and Sales Professionals Need to Communicate Value Beyond the IT Function
    For my sins, I consider myself to be a ‘pracademic’, a word I use to describe myself because I had a long and reasonably successful career in corporate life. For the past few years I’ve been a University Lecturer and in addition been involved in a couple o...
  • How to Avoid the Top B2B Marketing Mistake
    B2B marketing has evolved and continues to do so at such a rapid pace. Brands are getting extraordinary opportunities to interact with customers faster than ever and in ways they couldn’t have dreamed of even a few years ago. With new technologies and enga...
  • Why Value Propositions are a Team Sport
    Whose job is it to come up with your organization’s value proposition?As a lifelong marketer, I’m aware that value proposition development is widely seen as a marketer’s “thing”. But what really gets to me is that this narrow view of value proposition form...
  • How CMO's Can Become Indispensable Growth Drivers
    You may have heard that more and more companies are doing away with the “Chief Marketing Officer”. Instead, they are consolidating marketing, customer and commercial leadership strategy under a new leader—the Chief Growth Officer or Chief Revenue Officer.A...
  • Are You Laser Focused On Your Ideal Customer?
    Imagine that you’ve built a terrific product and are all set to launch it in the market as the next big thing that will solve people’s problems. But which people? “We are targeting everyone” is a phrase that no strategic marketer ever wants to hear. And ye...
  • 6 MUST-HAVES FOR B2B EVENT MARKETING SUCCESS

    B2B marketers spend 20-30% of their budget on event marketing every year. According to a Gartner CMO report, it’s one of the top four spending areas — ahead of social media, customer intelligence, and email marketing.

  • Swimming in a Sea of Sameness
    New research shows that B2B telecom firms are hellbent on sounding the sameThis may or may not come as a surprise to you, but we have an epidemic on our hands.My colleagues and I recently analyzed over 30 of the top global telecom websites and Twitter feed...
  • Sales and Marketing Alignment: Why You Need to Figure it Out
    In today’s omnichannel world where potential buyers get lots of product and company information online, it is crucial that sales and marketing are aligned to customer needs. CEB research showed that B2B buyers tend to be over 60% of the way through the sal...
  • B2B Marketing: It’s Time to Go Back to the Basics
    I love reading over everyone’s predictions for the New Year. Especially as it relates to marketing.But most of the predictions seem to be around marketing tactics – where you should allocate your budgets to reach more customers, how to create more website ...
  • Why Effective Content Marketing is All About Giving Value.
    You’ve probably seen these stats by now — up to 90% of the content that marketing creates is never used by the sales team, and 42% of content marketing is not effective. As a B2B marketer, I‘m aware of the fact that the sales team doesn’t always use the ma...
  • How To Get to the Heart of What Your Buyers Want
    As a B2B Marketing consultant, one of the questions I get asked most frequently is “how can I really know what my customers care about?”And, my answer is always the same — please do your research.If there’s one thing that has always confused me, it’s why b...
  • Lack of Preparation Kills Businesses: Why You Need To Do Your Homework
    For me, the word “homework” conjures up college memories of late nights, vending machine meals and stress. Maybe this is why most of us aren’t very eager to do our homework when we finally get to the “real world” of business. But, as much as I hated homewo...
  • Advice for B2B Marketers: How to Get Sales Buy-in
    According to John Kotter, author of Buy-In, “70% of all organizational change efforts fail, and one reason for this is executives simply don’t get enough buy-in, from enough people, for their initiatives and ideas.” As a marketer in any size organization, ...
  • Quantity vs. Quality Content Marketing: Why More Isn’t Always Better
    It’s the time of the year when many of us tend to over-indulge. Whether it’s saying yes to one more party. One more cookie. One more glass of wine. We get tricked into thinking that more is always better.There’s a similar deception happening in the marketi...
  • What Marketers Can Learn From Top Chefs
    I’ve been obsessed with reality TV cooking competitions lately. One of the more entertaining shows is “Chopped”, which features talented chefs on the Food Network. Each episode, four chefs must compete against each other in the creation of three courses: A...
  • 4 Scenarios When You Should Outsource Marketing
    No matter the size of your organization, chances are the perception is that you and your marketing team can handle it all. From redesigning the website, to launching a new campaign, and from generating industry buzz to developing compelling customer conten...
  • Advice for Marketers: How To Drive Growth (By Talking To Your Sales Team)
    Over the past decade I’ve had the opportunity to work with Sales teams of all sizes. My formal degree and passion are in Marketing, but I learned early on that in order for any of my marketing programs to be successful, I needed to build relationships with...
  • Revolutionize Your Business By Doing This ONE Small Thing
    Oftentimes it’s the little things that make the biggest difference. Take cooking, for example. One year I had the goal to learn how to cook at least one new dish per week. So I started by collecting a bunch of recipes online, and was quickly overwhelmed by...
  • The Secret of Creating Successful Buyer Personas
    Is your organization creating buyer personas? If not, you’re skipping a fundamental step in your marketing approach. But, perhaps the only thing worse than that is failing to use buyer personas effectively despite having them. And that’s exactly what’s hap...
  • Here’s Why You Need to Embrace a Customer-Centric Approach
    Let’s begin with a scenario — how much time do you spend focusing on your internal core operation rather than truly identifying market or customer needs and determining how your organization can best serve those needs? I’ve worked at many organizations tha...
  • How to Target Your Way to Content Marketing Success
    If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.” – Zig ZiglarWhy targeting is importantI love this old saying by Zig Ziglar. Not just because it’s packed with truth and life-lessons but also because it brilliantly sums up a classic content marketing mista...
  • 4 Steps to Up Your Content Marketing Game
    Don’t become a wandering generality. Be a meaningful specific.” – Zig ZiglarIf you’re in content marketing, these words of Zig Ziglar are something you might consider tattooing on your forehead. Why? Because generality breeds mediocrity and mediocre conten...
  • 3 Tips to Excel in B2B Marketing
    As we wrap up the first quarter, it’s a good time to review your marketing performance and set plans for what lies ahead. Did you manage to hit (better yet, crush) your goals or did you barely struggle to maintain performance? If you fall into the second g...
  • X Marks the Spot: Do You Know Where Your Business is Headed?
    “Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”The quote comes courtesy of Chinese military general, Sun Tzu’s Art of War, and is oft-quoted in the marketing world for how beautifully it sums...
  • Don’t Let Your Customers Dump You Silently, Listen to Them

    For every customer who bothers to complain, how many other customers remain silent?

    How many unhappy customers don’t complain or simply leave, never to return?

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