B2B marketing

Customer experience (CX) was at the forefront of CMOs’ minds in 2018. They shifted ad budgets (under siege thanks to trust and transparency issues) to even more technology and CX initiatives. Good news: The focus is creating more emotionally resonant and useful brand experiences such as Disney’s MagicBand. Bad news: The competitive advantage these experiences […]

Maturing Into A Horizontal Channel Management Platform Aligned With CRM and Marketing Automation Channel and alliance leaders are known to be good jugglers. With the average partner program containing over 90 distinct components, encouraging channel growth while mediating conflict is a complex undertaking. Partner relationship management (PRM) connects the dots between partner planning, recruitment, onboarding, […]

Forrester’s customer experience Forums are in their 10th year — from our first one in 2009 in New York, they’ve grown and spread to San Francisco, London, Singapore, and other cities around the world and have become yearly destinations for CX pros far and wide. CX Europe 2018 is just 12 days from now — Tuesday and Wednesday, […]

Personas and journey maps have become key tools for the modern marketer. As my colleague Lori Wizdo expertly explains: It is the job of marketing to guide the buyer through the buying journey. Becoming a journey marketer is essential in this digital age. (Lori can help you get there — check out her workshop at our upcoming […]

“Say, Tom, let me whitewash a little.” “No — no — I reckon it wouldn’t hardly do, Ben. You see, Aunt Polly’s awful particular about this fence . . . it’s got to be done very careful; I reckon there ain’t one boy in a thousand, maybe two thousand, that can do it the way it’s got […]

I am still catching my breath. Adobe has agreed to acquire Marketo for $4.75 billion. The deal is the biggest in Adobe’s history and a massive encore to the acquisition of Magento for a mere $1.7 billion in May. On the one hand, I find myself proud to be a B2B marketer — to think that […]

  Influencer marketing is often characterized as a trendy tactic for B2C marketers to tap into the far-reaching audiences of the Insta-famous. As a result, the practice regularly receives negative coverage for short-term-oriented, poorly executed B2C campaigns where consumer brands pay vapid lifestyle influencers outrageous sums in exchange for questionable ROI. There’s no doubt that […]

B2B marketers get it. They know they need to operate across their sales and marketing silos to get beyond portfolio-centric campaigns to connect with buyers via specific, contextually relevant content that engages customers across the entire life cycle. The question is no longer why. The question is how. That’s why I am excited about the sessions […]

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect on May 25, 2018. It’s been a few months, and the repercussions are yet to be fully realized, leaving practitioners anxious and wondering if they have fully prepared. So far, GDPR compliance efforts have largely targeted customer data management, digital marketing, and security. However, […]

Journey mapping can be an energizing and eye-opening exercise in customer empathy. As advisors to B2B CX and marketing leaders in the Forrester Leadership Boards (FLB), we come along on many journey mapping “journeys.” The most common question we receive from executives is, “How do I ensure the journey mapping process is actionable and aligned […]

Can we address the elephant in the room? Account-based marketing (ABM) is not just about marketing. It’s about accounts — and how to win, serve, and retain them better than your competition. In our new research on the state of ABM, we found that B2B marketers are enjoying more measurable, substantial results from their account-based efforts this […]

Can we address the elephant in the room? Account-based marketing (ABM) is not just about marketing. It’s about accounts — and how to win, serve, and retain them better than your competition. In our new research on the state of ABM, we found that B2B marketers are enjoying more measurable, substantial results from their account-based efforts this […]

Last week, I had the opportunity to speak at a dinner event with 20-plus senior marketers and business partners that InsideView sponsored. We wanted to explore how well marketing and sales are facing up to new go-to-market (GTM) challenges associated with buyer behavior change in general, account-based marketing (ABM) specifically. To get the conversation going, […]

Well, that was interesting! We just published our “The Forrester New Wave™: ABM Platforms, Q2 2018” report, which profiles the 14 most significant vendors in this market: 6sense, Demandbase, Engagio, Jabmo (formerly Azalead), Lattice Engines, Madison Logic, MRP, Radius, RollWorks, TechTarget, Terminus, Triblio, True Influence, and ZenIQ. Based on our comprehensive criteria, Forrester’s take is […]

“To survive in a world of ‘killer competition,’ you can either distinguish yourself from your competitors or offer the lowest price.” That’s the opinion of Jack Trout, co-author of Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, late president of Trout & Partners, father of the positioning concept. In this month’s conversation with Johannesburg-based author Mark Eardley, […]

It is such a pleasure to be back at Forrester, especially now when our firm is actively embracing and helping you, our customers, leverage new technologies to innovate and differentiate your business. After three years leading technology strategy and market development for Microsoft Azure and Equinix, what brought me back were three things: The value […]

Marketers today are managing more channels, more content, and more data, while delivering vast quantities of personalized content quickly around the globe. As digital marketing complexity increases, more marketers are embracing automation tools to improve efficiency and speed to market. In our first Marketing Automation Technology Forecast, 2017 To 2023, we expect global spending on […]

  Over the past few decades, sales and marketing leaders have been transforming themselves into predictable, data-driven business units. The CRM stage started in the 1990s and accelerated quickly a decade later with lower-priced cloud offerings. The marketing automation stage began to grow exponentially around 2008 and has reached critical mass in its first decade. […]

You have to feel bad for marketers: For years, they’ve tried to keep pace with changing buyer behaviors and adapt to the cross-device and cross-channel habits of their customers. To guide their progress, they’ve fallen back on familiar routines: benchmarking against past performance, optimizing short-term results, and pushing people through the sales funnel. The problem […]