FIR B2B #16: How ANSYS Turned More Than 100 Tech Experts Into Bloggers

Paul anchors the podcast solo this week. In this episode:

News & Trends

An EMarketer study  finds that B2B content marketing efforts are overly focused on lead generation at the expense of thought leadership. It’s a good point. Content marketing is rarely as effective at the lower reaches of the funnel as it is in the early stages. You can measure ROI even at the top of the funnel, but you have to know the lifetime value of your customer.

The Buyer Persona Blog cites a recent study by the Information Technology Services Marketing Association that found that 44% of marketers think buyer personas are important but only 15% think they use them effectively. It underlies the point that buyers aren’t demographic statistics; they’re people. If you aren’t in contact with them, you can create profiles but not personas.

A new study from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) indicates that most senior executives still rely more on intuition than data when making big decisions. This echoes another survey earlier this year that found that 61% of US business decision-makers believe that human insights should precede hard analytics when making decisions. This is another argument for getting to know your customers as people. Data is only one part of the decision-making picture.

A post on the Marketing Craftsmanship blog cites research that illustrate the new reality that buyers research decisions exhaustively before contacting a sales person. Content marketing is supposed to address this problem, but it doesn’t work if you just use it to blast marketing messages. Less is more. Listen and respond.

Special Guest: Sandy Adam

Sandy Adam is Social Media Marketing Manager at ANSYS, a maker of sophisticated modeling software, and a big fan of social media marketing. When she arrived at ANSYS, the company’s blog was lightly trafficked. A survey showed that customers wanted more technical information. By enlisting subject matter experts (SMEs) as contributors, celebrating their successes and providing support and editing, Sandy has succeeded in making the blog the source of nearly half of the traffic to the ANSYS website. More than 100 SMEs have contributed.

Follow Sandy on Twitter. Get this Podcast:

About Your Hosts

Paul GillinPaul Gillin is a veteran technology journalist and a thought leader in new media. Since 2005, he has advised marketers and business executives on strategies to optimize their use of social media and online channels to reach buyers cost-effectively. He is the author or co-author of five books, including Social Marketing to the Business Customer (2011), the first book devoted entirely to B2B social media marketing. He is also a social media trainer and coach at Profitecture, a training firm for B2B companies and their channel partners.

Allan SchoenbergAllan Schoenberg is based Vice President, Corporate Public Relations and Communications at TIAA-CREF in New York. As part of the firm’s Enterprise Communications team within Marketing, this role helps the team drive firm-wide corporate communications, employee communications, reputation and crises management, social media, CEO positioning and public policy communications. He has more than 20 years of experience in B2B communications, including his work for Accenture, Edelman Worldwide, Fleishman Hillard and CME Group..

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Posted by Paul Gillin on 09/21 at 05:56 AM

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Next entry: The Hobson & Holtz Report - Podcast #774: September 22, 2014

Previous entry: Thought Leadership with Mitchell Levy and Michael Procopio, Episode 40: September 19, 2014

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