Maastary B2B Marketing Blog

 A thought provoking post from Maastary's newest team member, Steve Fink.  With significant changes occuring in technology buyer's behavior and purchase processes due to widespread use of the Internet and social media, what will the impact be on the sales organization and partner relationships?

Every savvy business owner knows about the "marketing mix" but is yours up-to-date? Are you operating with Marketing Mix 2.0 yet?

1. Network intelligence is what you get when you tap into other people's brains. Your network is a vital source of intelligence because people offer private observations and impressions that would never appear in a more formal source, such as the Wall Street Journal. People in your network offer personalized contextual advice because they know you, your interests and your skill set. They can help you filter information you get from other sources, which books to read, which search results to ignore.

A Guest Post from Roger Walton of TSJ Consulting

There are many reasons for B2B technology companies to include social media in their marketing mix. In my area of focus, the tech sector, about a quarter of buyers are regular users of Facebook, LinkedIn and/or Twitter (IDC). Many B2B companies that are active in social media report that they generate leads from it – including over 60% of those on LinkedIn (Hubspot). Meanwhile, the case is growing even stronger as search engines such as Google increase the weight given to social media activity in determining their rankings. 

 How have your marketing priorities changed over the last five years? Are you doing more  or less direct mail, more or less email? How about trade shows and events?

While most businesses have experienced the effects of the economic downturn, many have prospered and continued to grow. Of course, there are numerous factors that determine success, but having leadership with a growth mindset is considered by many to be a critical success factor*.

How can a baseball story help you with marketing? Moneyball is a book and movie about an undercapitalized baseball team that used analytics to identify market inefficiencies in the bidding for players. This allowed them to buy players who got on based and scored runs at a very low price. By using this disciplined approach, the Oakland A’s manager Billy Bean beat teams with payrolls 5 times the size of his.  In 2002, they set the American League record for the most consecutive wins, 20 games. B2B marketing is also inefficient; a more disciplined approach allows companies to beat their bigger budget competitors.

My last blog post was about using thought leadership as a way to influence your buyers' decision process. Six keys to marketing business services were identified including marketing automation. This post explores the question of "Why Automate?".

Promoting business services has always been more challenging than marketing products unless there is a well understood category for your  services. If you provide plumbing or cleaning services it's easy to leverage Yelp or Craig's list. You can even put your name and URL on the side of your vehicle. But if you provide marketing services or business consulting services, these categories are too broad to help smaller firms attract potential clients. A search for "marketing services" on Google, for example, yields 168,000,000 results!