We spoke to Justin Shriber, Vice President of Marketing for LinkedIn Sales and Marketing Solutions, to start off the new year. He put together a series of predictions for the year ahead, and in this discussion he explains them and the role that LinkedIn will play in advancing B2B sales and marketing in 2018.

— Smart, quanitative driven marketers will still be in high demand, but the pendulum will start to swing back toward marketers that have a qualitative eye for good stories.

— Brands will re-evaluate the platforms on which they post their content, favoring those that have gone on record saying that user trust is a priority for them. Brands want platforms that give them control over affiliations and customer IDs, where they show up, and the audiences to which they’re exposed.

— Sales will be the new awareness marketing channel. Sales used to be the direct connection to prospects, but we will see sellers start to build awareness through direct advocacy programs.

— Marketing will gather more intelligence around the reach employees have on the sales side. There will be formal processes that make it possible for employees to easily decide what shareable content speaks to them so they can maintain their own individuality while also benefiting the company. 

— LinkedIn Sales Navigator will play an increasing role in this unification of marketing and sales efforts. 

— Sales and marketing alignment will continue to improve. Organizations need to engage both sales and marketing in a concerted way from awareness through conversion, rather than having marketing take the front end and sales the back end.

Listen to our 21 minute podcast here.

Our guest for this week’s episode is Ray Grady, the President of CloudCraze. In a recent report, CloudCraze uncovers the value B2B organizations are seeing from digital channels and their future expectations for online sales. Forrester expects eCommerce to reach $889 billion and represent 11% of total B2B sales in the U.S. by the end of 2017. Without a doubt, a digital revolution has taken place in B2B, leading to explosive growth for those who have invested in eCommerce. 

We ask Grady about his survey, which covered 400 representatives of consumer packaged goods, manufacturing and software companies. It found some interesting and perhaps non-obvious results:

• More than half of B2B businesses (56%) give self-service access to all of their customers.
• For the first time in B2B history, nearly half of B2B businesses sell their full product line online.
• Sixty percent of B2B decision-makers indicate that the growth of digital has caused their sales team to grow along with it.
• European businesses are generally more advanced than U.S.-based businesses when it comes to the maturity of their digital commerce sites. They have more of a global mindset, a greater willingness to embrace agile systems and present their site in many different languages. EU buyers are also more comfortable buying B2B products and services online.

You can listen to the 21 min. podcast here.

This week my podcasting partner Paul Gillin and I talk to Seth Greene about how to market small (and large) businesses using some time-tested direct response marketing methods that begin with creating podcasts. Seth is the author of Market Domination for Podcasting, as well as several other books. He offers so much great advice in this interview that you’ll want to have your notebook handy. Among his tips and observations about podcasting:

• Global smartphone proliferation and Apple CarPlay have been big factors in the recent rapid growth of podcasts. It’s time for businesses to take notice.
• It’s not about big markets – A few hundred regular listeners can give your business a great boost if they’re the right people.
• Optimal length is 20-30 minutes, which is the length of the average workout or commute.
• You can do a lot of your own promotion. Use Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. Send email to your clients. Ask your guests to promote to their lists.
• Interview formats work well for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s hard to keep a narrative going all by yourself for a half hour. Another is that guests will often promote to their friends and associates. If you have a co-host, it’s even easier to keep the discussion moving. In Seth’s case, a partnership with TV celebrity Kevin Harrington has been a huge boost to listenership.
• The biggest mistake B2B marketers make with podcasts is being boring. You’ve got to bring personality to your show.
• Don’t turn down any opportunity for media promotion of your program. You never know who’s reading/listening.

Greene’s Market Domination firm has been one of the fastest growing direct response marketing firms in the country. He is the only person in history that Dan Kennedy has nominated for marketer of the year three years in a row and he’s been featured on numerous TV shows and quoted frequently in national business magazines.

Check out his SharkPreneur podcast, co-hosted with Shark Tank’s Kevin Harrington, and follow Seth on Twitter.

I have been producing various podcasts for more than a decade. I got interested in them back in the day when I had a long commute and listened to Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code and Mark Nemcoff’s PCH podcasts. After a long hiatus, podcasts are again on the rise, and you might be interested in reading this piece about the three fundamental moments that have contributed to podcasts’ recent resurgence.

As you know, many of my podcasts were done with my partner in crime Paul Gillin. We took some time on a recent episode of our show FIR B2B to look at what corporate marketers should do to make better podcasts.

First, you need to think about podcasts as one part of your overall online media and brand-building effort, and not just a one-off. You want to build an audience over time and complement what you are doing with blogs, social media, and other content.

All successful podcasts contain multiple voices and aren’t just a single person talking; those get boring quickly. Use multiple elements, such as listener mail, headlines, short takes, offbeat items and quizzes. Find a theme that can work across multiple episodes. The theme doesn’t have to be “brand promotion,” indeed, podcasts work best if that isn’t your theme. And while you are thinking up a theme, find some royalty-free (what is called podsafe) music intro and outro that you can use to punch it up and make it sound more professional. Amazon is one of many places where you can find low-cost podsafe music.

The optimum length is tough to predict. Some podcasts run out of steam at five minutes, while others can hold your attention for 45 minutes. Factors to consider include the number of topics to cover, the depth of the discussion, the chemistry of the speakers and the attention span of the audience. Ask your listeners for feedback.

As you can see here, show notes add keywords to your posts, which helps to increase search engine traffic. Add ID3 tags to your audio files for the same effect, because search engines can’t read audio.

If you are looking for a good list of hosting providers, check this one out. Really, any hosting provider that allows you to FTP your audio should be fine.

Finally, don’t despair about measurement and metrics. While you can measure downloads, that doesn’t tell you whether someone actually listened to the entire episode. David uses Wistia metrics on his screencast videos to track all sorts of granular activity, but there’s no tool that we know of to measure actual listenership.

You can listen to our episode here:

Can data drive a marketing campaign and still keep it creative? Yes, provided you bridge the divide between art and science by benefiting both sides. Paul Gillin and I examine a recent article in Marketoonist that discusses this issue. Blogger Tom Fishburne quotes an agency head who heard a principal from another agency say, “Data drives every piece of creative we put out today.” The agency chief’s reaction: “Boy, your creative must really suck.” When marketers stray from being data-driven to being data-blinded, campaigns fall flat.

One piece worth reviewing about this appeared on one of the Google blogs last year. Google, DoubleClick and an ad agency collaborated to explore how to best do data-driven campaigns, and came up with three suggestions:

• Know all the sources of data available, and figure out which can fuel smarter creative.
• Bring in the agency at the start of a project and talk about what data makes the most sense before any creative program is designed.
• Collaborate and communicate to the extreme.

Fishburne cites an example of a creative video campaign for the state of Tennessee that struck the right balance. Data was used to determine what versions of pre-roll ads to display, with the creative being designed to evoke an emotional response.

Speaking of creative, Amazon has unleashed a slew of actions by various cities around North America in its response to its quest find a site for its second headquarters. Tucson delivered a 21-foot Sagauro cactus, while Kansas City posted creative product ratings on Amazon’s own site to explain its advantages. Some mayors have put together their own wacky YouTube pitch videos. This is every bit a B2B campaign, although not one most marketers can relate to very closely. What we like about it is that Amazon didn’t state the rules too clearly, leaving a lot of room for bidder interpretation. That led to greater creativity. We can’t wait to see who wins (hope it’s St. Louis or Boston).

You can listen to our 16 min. podcast here:

This week we discuss several aspects of social media: how to use and abuse analytic tools, whether your CEO should have social media accounts, and understanding the differences between using social media as a “narrowcast” one-way medium vs. having actual interactions and conversations across various networks. We cite two different studies.

Domo and CEO.com released their annual CEO social media survey earlier this summer. They found that 40 of the Fortune 500 CEOs have a Facebook page, down from 57 two years ago. We don’t think the drop is necessarily a thing. Every corporate executive should have a solid account and profile on LinkedIn – and we suggest that CMOs should take some time to review those accounts to ensure that they reflect well on both the individual and the corporation – but engaging on social media creates an obligation to continue that engagement, and not all CEOs are comfortable with that idea.

We also examine a Forrester report from earlier this year. (PDF here) on how to measure social programs. The authors point out that many marketers say they haven’t been able to show the impact of social at all, and that it can be hard to pin down its actual impact. Marketers mistakenly expect social metrics to parallel digital performance channels rather than augment these channels help guide their efforts and add color or feedback at the appropriate places. If you expect social media to deliver an immediate boost to sales, you’re probably barking up the wrong tree.

Listen to our 16 min. podcast here.

The Equifax data breach that was revealed last week has so far been an unmitigated disaster – for the company. While we could spend the entire show talking about the firm’s missteps, we just touch quickly on the lowlights, including poor IT management, the lousy breach notification, a confusing website that was constructed in haste and with overwrought legalese, the lack of quality reporting from the general and security trade press about the incident, and how hard it is to find out whether your own personal information has been compromised. Sadly, this breach will be a case study of what not to do in marketing communications for years to come.

We move on to something that we both have spoken and written about frequently, keyed to a piece that ran this week on Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey (We’d give you a link, but the site is behind a paywall.) It’s about David’s attitude toward PR pitches. He and Paul go over some of his their preferences on things like the length of pitches, whether to mention competitors, how pitch use metaphors and the value of third-party support endorsements. One thing we agree on: Re-pitching – or following up on an earlier pitch – is a good way put yourself in the doghouse. and end up in the deleted email pile.

This week Paul Gillin and I talk to Crowded Ocean’s partners Carol Broadbent and Tom Hogan. The two have written The Ultimate Startup Guide, the foundation of which is their work with 47 different startups over the past 10 years. Ten of those companies have had successful exits, and only two went out of business, so our guests have credibility.

We invited them to join us after we read their piece in VentureBeat about “marketing-as-a-service.” Most organizations hire their CMOs first, but the duo recommend that this should actually be the last position to be filled by a startup. “Most CMOs have a bulls-eye painted on their backs, they have the shortest tenure, and often startups hire the wrong species,” they said.

Instead, Carol and Tom suggest that you examine more closely the different component skills that make up marketing, and staff accordingly. These include product management, corporate marketing, product marketing and IT fluency. The evolved CMO has the backbone of the marketing department, the breadth and understanding of the customer experience and the depth of a new key organizational growth pillar that shapes their point of view. Our guests suggest that the initial full-time marketing insider should be someone that they call “Seth” who is a 28-year-old numbers jockey who can give their sales organization demand generation data.

Other recommendations: Hire a stable of reliable contractors rather than fulfilling every need with full-timers. Simplify your website’s message. “Too many startups want to display all their great ideas and technology on their website, turning it into a library of brochure-ware that a prospect has to wade through,” they wrote in VentureBeat. And design online content and structure that can be useful on mobile devices.

Carol and Tom’s recommendations challenge a lot of the conventional wisdom, but they have the track record to justify them. Listen to our 21 min. podcast here:

Danielle Cooley has spent more than 18 years applying a number of user experience (UX) research and design techniques to a wide variety of applications, including hardware, Windows, web, telephone and mobile. Her work has benefited such organizations as Pfizer, Navy Federal Credit Union, Fidelity Investments, Hyundai, Graco, Enterprise Rent-a-Car and more. She is a frequent conference speaker at professional UX gatherings and holds several technical degrees.

Paul Gillin and I talked to her on our latest podcast about rookie UX mistakes, such as popup come-ons and autoloading videos, the difference between UX and user interfaces, and how marketers should consider the UX maturity model of their organizations when developing their programs.

Danielle also ranted a bit about the “hamburger menu” of three parallel lines that are often shown in many mobile apps (including my latest website redesign, oops!) and how they have become a cover-up for bad navigation. Here’s a presentation on what to do instead.

Danielle and I wrote this article for a UX journal where we use the example of four data breaches (Cici’s Pizza, Home Depot, Wendy’s Restaurants, and Omni Hotels) to see how each firm tried to regain its customers’ trust.