MarketingProfs B2B Nuggets of B2B Wisdom

Annuitas Blog Team

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This year’s MarketingProfs B2B Forum 2016 is a whirl-wind of data, inspiration, marketing advice, how-to’s and more than a little fun. What makes an event a success from an attendee’s perspective? Is it the sessions you can attend (by attend I mean find a seat for), the activities you can engage in (morning mixers or yoga), the quality of content (first-rate speakers and presentations) or the accessibility of VIPs and speakers to further your education. It’s a mix of all the above.

I was lucky enough to attend several sessions last week and I feel compelled to share some of the marketing, strategy, and leadership nuggets that I learned. This is not an exhaustive list by any means, I just wish I could have been in more sessions as the choices were hard to make. If you didn’t make the event, take a look at the conversations on Twitter via #mpb2b or take advantage of the 58 recorded sessions available on demand. You won’t be disappointed.

Michael Brenner: Content Marketing Strategy for Any Size Budget
Whether you have a multi-million dollar content marketing budget or a few hundred dollars, you can create content that engages your buyer. Develop and document your strategy first to make sure you are delivering what your buyer wants. Content should focus on the intersection of your target personas and audience interest and that overlap is what you should create content about.

Joe Pulizzi: A New Content Marketing Approach: Marketing As A Profit Center
Content marketing has gone mainstream, no doubt about it. So how do you make it rise above the noise of other brands? Words of advice from Pulizzi are that “everyone stops at the sweet spot…hardly anyone tilts the content. It’s critical to tilt, otherwise, you won’t break into anything new.”

Tim Washer: Creative Writing: Lessons From The Comedy Writers Room
Often B2B marketers think they can’t use comedy in their content, but follow the rule of three and you can. Best example from the session was a Valentine’s Day video on the perfect gift…a new Cisco router. Now that is love. To use humor, just think about these three areas:

1. Start with a customer pain point
2. Explore what would happen if there were no solution or explore consequences for unexpected stakeholders
3. Exaggerate to the Nth degree and look for urgency (life or death).

Matt T. Grant and Andrew Moravick: Are You a Marketer or a Mind-Reader? How to know what you B2B Buyer is Really Thinking
The biggest thing to remember Is your content answering the right questions for your audience? Can you write your customers mind? If you can’t – look deeper and learn more about them before you attempt it.

John Maeda: Keynote about using #DesignInTech
The idea of #DesignInTech is that it is design related to tech, but radically different from traditional design. One of the biggest values of art in technology ties into the customer experience today and we need to remember that users, our customers, need to be happy and have positive experiences.

Lee Odden: Sexy Hot B2B Influencer Activation: The Art And Science of Romancing the B2B Industry Influencer and Advocate Content Using Leading Influencer Tools
This session gave so many helpful hints and names and examples of actual tools and templates to put into use immediately. When thinking about engaging industry influencers, remember to understand the definition of influencer marketing according to Odden. The definition is “to work with internal and industry experts to co-create content for mutual value.” The important part of the definition is to remember to work to achieve measurable business goals as too often that important part is forgotten.

Mary Ann Fitz Maurice Reilly, Margaret Malloy and Doug Bewsher: From Modern Marketer to CMO to CEO
This panel focused on building your skill set as a marketer and as a future leader and delivered insightful advice on how to develop your strategy for success. On how to advance your career, Bewsher, CEO of Leadspace, shared that it was important to develop your spike (area that you are a world-class marketer in) and then build a broad skillset for the other critical areas of marketing.

Reilly gave her advice on how to go from managing a few direct reports to running a whole organization? Hire good people and make sure you hire smart people (who are smarter than you) as well as different than you are. Hire people who compliment your own skill set. As a leader, you go from working in the business to working on the business. A final piece of advice on leadership? Give clear direction.

As marketers, we cannot stop learning. MarketingProfs makes it easy to keep that learning and does it in style.