The Funnelholic

I now start every blog post with “it’s been awhile”. I apologize to anyone who cares, but I had twins (yeah!), and I have been slammed with work at Focus.com. I was inspired to write by my co-worker Lauren Harper’s awesome post on community management — massive props to Lauren. Also, I have been back in the trenches so I am back to picking up real world tips and best practices that work or don’t work. I have been jotting down my ideas and have been waiting to blog on each individual point, but I am just going to bundle them up once in awhile instead.

Tips are below:

Use account-based marketing when selling and marketing expensive, enterprise class products – I participated in a roundtable with Lauren Goldstein, Lisa Horner, and Ardath Albee on b2b demand generation,  you can listen to the roundtable here.  There were a lot of great tips to the event, but here is one I locked in on:  For enterprise class demand generation, ie. demand generation focused on big ticket, 6-7 figure sales, Lauren suggested creating content campaigns tailored specifically for each individual accounts. If you are going to make a million bucks on the client, isn’t it worth it? We talk a lot about relevancy and how that rises you above the noise.  Well, tailoring your content for that big whale client is a prime example of uber-relevancy and I think an absolutely great idea.

To read about account-based marketing directly from Lauren, click here
For an example, read this about what her team did with Nuance

Be specific in your content – one thing the content explosion has created has been a lot of writing and talking about concept(s).  These  concepts are re-hashed over and over. In the marketing blogosphere EVERYONE is saying the same thing.  Does this sound familiar:  “The buyer has changed, they don’t come to you…lodi dodi, we like to party”.  Don’t get my wrong, I understand the change in buying behavior but a lot of us just want to get on with it and go tear it up.  So here is the deal: The way you create compelling content is today’s chaotic world of “blowhard-ism” is to offer up real-world, specific examples of how ideas are being executed. Here are some simple rules that I am trying to apply to my content:

1. Produce tangible, “ready to use” tips and best practices in your content (blog posts, white papers, webinars).  Example: see above

2. Back up your tips and best practices with real applications and examples. Example: see below

Here is an example of a blog post that has real tips and real data to back it up:  Jon Miller’s My Secret Methods for Turning Marketing Leads into Qualified Sales Leads. It is a valuable guide with real-world examples.  The examples are not just for credibility but help the reader visualize and understand what they need to go do.

Hope you enjoy.

Written by Craig Rosenberg - The Funnelholic
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