By David Brond and Samantha Oscar

Content marketing—the business process focused on creating and distributing relevant and valuable information to attract and engage target audiences with the objective of driving action—is one of today’s business-growth strategies getting a lot of attention from marketers in many organizations, including those in healthcare. And with good reason.Read full post...

Writing is quickly becoming an important skill for marketers to have.

I’m no writer. Which might become evident as you make your way through this. When I was in college, nobody told me how important writing would be once I landed a marketing job. Maybe they didn’t think it was important because of how fast everything in marketing and advertising changes. But I’ve come to accept my fate as a marketer—I must be a writer. As marketers, we can’t deny it or pretend it isn’t a huge part of our jobs. With marketing and advertising making a shift from traditional to digital, more of our everyday job has become writing. Emails. Blogs. Content. Tweets. Press releases. Proposals. StrategiesRead full post...

I happen to be an early millennial (1986), and my brothers came around at the end (2000 & 2002) And the three of us consume content very differently, and much differently than mom and dad.

If you’re not a millennial, you probably have a mental image of how we behave—we can’t put our phones down, we can’t pay attention to anything for more than a few seconds, we aren’t following the traditional 9–5 workday and we can be kind of difficult.

It’s all true.

But we’re also an important demographic—and we’re changing the way marketers do their job.Read full post...

Whether you have separate teams dedicated to marketing and new business development, or you have one person responsible for both, you need to start an inbound marketing program. What makes inbound so important?

Let’s start with something everyone (especially our b2b clients) realizes: The buyer’s journey has changed. There’s now this Zero Moment of Truth—the moment when a person identifies a problem and then heads to Google to research a solution. If you don’t come up on that first page, chances are your competitors do, and they will snag that lead and eventually that paying customer.Read full post...

If you’re a B2B company and aren’t blogging on the reg yet, what in the world are you waiting for? While your competitors are blogging to generate new leads, you’re going to become a victim of falling behind. But I get it – you’re busy – and in charge of everything from strategic planning, running the day to day, your social media, answering to the sales department and having to prove marketing’s ROI to the boss-man. But if a blog is done correctly, it can be a powerful lead-generating tool, SEO booster and all-over knockout way to prove your organization’s expertise and knowledge.Read full post...

Bad emails can ruin your nurturing strategy!

Earlier this week I received the following email, and because of their confidentiality notice I’m just going to paste the copy:

Subject: Additional Sales Leads

Hi,

Are you currently in need of help in generating leads or appointments for your business? We can help you through our Multichannel Marketing Solutions.

I’d be happy to talk to you and discuss our program. Please let me know the best way for us to connect. Read full post...

Inbound or content marketing is nothing new. As marketers, we’ve been creating content — e-books, white papers, webinars, infographics, blogs — for years. What’s new is using inbound to build business. Here’s how: We create content that potential buyers want and need, optimize the website, build trust with the prospect through personalized lead nurturing, and eventually turn that prospect into a customer.

And we do all of this in real time, while we track what’s working and what isn’t, enabling us to show the ROI of marketing. Statistics tell us inbound methods cost 62% less than outbound methods, and generate three times more leads. Those are some pretty awesome numbers.Read full post...

Know what drives your prospects.

As marketers, we need to help our sales teams with longer sales cycles face one of their biggest challenges: staying top-of-mind during a decision-making process that can drag on for months or years. At AB&C, we’ve come up with a process that uses strategy and technology to meet this challenge without breaking the bank.

Step 1: Work with your sales team to identify key drivers in the prospect’s decision-making process.

Read full post...

10,000 marketers from all over the world attended Inbound 2014 in Boston.

I spent all of last week in Boston at Inbound 2014. The conference was full of ridiculously smart speakers — Martha Stewart, Malcolm Gladwell and Simon Sinek were all wonderful keynotes. It was impossible to leave a session without being fired up. But I don’t want to go on about how awesome every session was (I’m sure a few other fellow attendees will do that), or how strongly I believe inbound/content marketing is the way to go (that’ll be a separate post), or even how great the beers and bars in Beantown are. I really want to comment on some interesting things I noticed about the people.  Read full post...

To create a better landing page, follow these 10 steps.

So, you have marketing tactics driving people to your website. Great! The next question most marketers ask is, “How can I make the site work harder for me?”

1. Identify business goals.

Before you can figure out how to make a landing page work harder, ask yourself, “What was the business need behind the campaign?” Lead generation, patient education, engagement? Answering this will help define a call-to-action (CTA) to engage visitors on the landing page. It will also help you find effective ways to measure how well everything is working.Read full post...