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How To Fix The Most Common Content Marketing Mistakes

by Trisha Winter 1 Comment

Content marketing has done wonders for demand generation. If done correctly, it can organically engage, educate and bring target buyers into your pipeline. However, as marketing departments established content marketing groups and processes, often times key concepts slipped through the cracks. This is particularly prevalent in larger organizations I work with where aspects of content marketing are handled across multiple departments.

After working with many companies on their content marketing, here is my list of the five most common content marketing mistakes I see and tactical advice for how to fix them.

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Don’t Make Product Marketers Write—Make Them Outline

by Trisha Winter 6 Comments

Product marketers. They are the golden goose of software companies. This mythical combination of technical product knowledge and writing prowess. Marketing is depending on them for a steady stream of whitepapers (a.k.a. golden eggs) so they can generate demand for the business. It sounds wonderful, but alas, it is really more of a fairy tale.

The Reality of What Product Marketing Does

According to Pragmatic Marketing’s Annual Survey, on average product marketers work 46 hours per week and 53% of that time is spent in meetings and managing email. Another 20% is spent supporting development efforts and 15% is spent helping sales with existing customer deals or prospects. That leaves a measly 9% of their time spent creating and reviewing marketing materials. Not a lot of golden eggs can be created in 4 fragmented hours a week.

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It’s Time to Socialize Social

by Trisha Winter 2 Comments

Here we are more than a decade past when B2B companies started using social media as a promotional channel and we still haven’t figured out the best way to manage it. Looking forward, our approach needs to be about enabling all marketers in the process to add their expertise in order to create relevant social posts that your target audience wants to click through. To sum it up—we need to socialize social.

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Survey Says! Personalization is Key to Content Marketing

by Trisha Winter 1 Comment

Personalization. It’s not just the latest marketing buzz-word. It’s the way to break through the noise and reach your target audience. In fact, it’s a concept that is driving much of the marketing automation technology innovation for both B2B and B2C companies. So, it makes sense that we spend some time figuring out why it is so important and how you can start personalizing your go-to-market. To help us on our journey, I’ll reference key statistics and findings from three well done research studies: the Salesforce State of Marketing Survey, Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer Research and the B2B Content Marketing 2019: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs.

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The Opportunity Cost of Product Marketing Content Gaps

by Trisha Winter 5 Comments

After writing an article on the ROI of outsourcing demand generation content, I was asked if the same numbers and reasoning held true for product marketing content. I definitely write a lot of white papers, core website messaging and even sales enablement content so there must be value there too. But what are the actual numbers?

Read on for the hard numbers on more than doubling the output of product marketing with ⅙ of the cost of a product marketer.

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The ROI Case for Outsourcing Demand Generation Content

by Trisha Winter 2 Comments

The gig economy sounds great, but is it really a fit for Corporate America? Marketing departments have been outsourcing for years to get specialized deliverables. But what about outsourcing the content that defines your message and relationship with your prospects and customers? Should that ever be outsourced?

Absolutely! Here’s why:

  1. It’s 4x less expensive! (Read on for the calculations.)
  2. It can produce a better product.
  3. Higher quality resources are now available to deliver on these promises.

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Successful Business Development Have These 4 Things In the Bag

by Trisha Winter

One of the most common moves I see a startup do is hire a business development person too early. Yes, there is pressure from early investors (and your spouses) to start making money. However, investing too early will be wasted money because your hotshot business development hire won’t have the right tools to succeed. Read on to learn what you need to figure out and create before making that critical hire or to evaluate whether or not you have the right tools for your existing team.

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How to Get References When You Don’t Have Willing Customers

by Trisha Winter 1 Comment

I work with a lot of startups on positioning and one of the most gaping holes is always references. When I ask the question, “Who is willing to say that your solution is awesome?” the answer is always, “No one, we don’t have customers (or willing customers) yet.” They then expect me to move on to my next question, but instead I dig in my heels. Because you can get references! You just need to know where to look.

Top places to get references – other than customers

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Top Tools to Get Lumbering Opportunities Moving Quickly

by Trisha Winter

One of the top frustrations I hear from sales and marketing is, “Our opportunities seem to get stuck in the pipeline, we need a way to create urgency so they purchase.” This is a common problem for many companies as most products and solutions are a nice-to-have. Will they improve the lives of buyers? Sure! But it doesn’t mean there is a fire burning under them to buy it. This is the reality so many B2B salespeople are faced with – trying to drag opportunities through to the next stage without clear motivation for them to do so.

Just like the article on how to turn prospects into excited opportunities, sales and marketing need to create a journey for opportunities in order for them to progress to purchase. A journey where sales is adding value at each step. With some help from marketing, you can insert some great tools into your sales cycle to do just that.

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