It’s not quite the dog days of summer, so more often than not, I can keep my windows at home open. And at Forrester, the B2B marketing team is heads down, finalizing a lineup of amazing speakers and reviewing draft content for the (your) B2B Marketing 2017 forum coming up the first week of October in Austin, Texas. So I thought I’d lift my head up for a bit and check to see how our blogs are resonating with you and how the themes that they contain have so far influenced our road map for your forum, based on your view. In an attempt to make your window larger, we looked at the top-read blogs to confirm that we’re planning the right road map for you.

Regarding the top-read B2B marketing blogs during the first half of 2017, here’s the view that you’re showing us and the ways in which we’re planning to incorporate it into the landscape of the upcoming forum:

  1. In Steve Casey‘s blog, Bypass Branding No More: Why It Matters More Than Ever For Today’s Customer-Centric B2B Marketer, Steve tells you how today’s digital-first B2B buyers are acting more like consumers than their old-school analog forbears could ever have imagined. This is a thread that he’ll be picking up during his keynote session: How To Effectively Engage Today’s B2B Consumer.
  2. B2B Buyers Make The Case For Better Marketing And Sales Alignment is Mary Shea‘s top blog of 2017 (so far). During the upcoming event, she’ll be digging even deeper into an essential component that will align and and balance not only your direct channels but also your indirect ones.
  3. Not far behind was my post, It’s Time To Take Flight With Social Selling, which I based on some highly popular research that Mary Shea wrote. Erna Alfred Liousas will discuss not only social selling but also best practices to leverage social strategies at scale across the full customer life cycle.
  4. Allison Snow wrote about the importance of moving from measurement to management in Link Marketing Results To Decision Making And Revenue Outcomes. This report was important in lead-based efforts, but it’s now the lynchpin for account-based marketing’s (ABM’s) success. To continue your team’s focus on helping organizations accelerate their ABM results, don’t forget to sign up for the preforum workshop about ABM that Laura Ramos and Steve Casey will lead.
  5. The fifth most popular B2B marketing blog of 2017 is Venturing Into ABM? What You Should Be Asking that Laura Ramos At the forum, Laura will share the marketing best practices of the customer-obsessed and reveal the results of our new primary research study.
  6. Jay McBain is a recent addition to the B2B team, and his post not been live long enough to hit your top-five list. But I can’t help myself from calling out his blog post Does Your Channel Run In A Silo? At the forum, Jay will present his view of the future of channels and how you all have a role to play in it.

I’m getting a little giddy just thinking about all of this – time to get outside and enjoy what I’ve been considering from my office window. Hope that you are getting enough time to do the same and that we’ll see each other in October at the B2B Marketing 2017 forum!

Register using the discount code B2BBLOG17 for $200 savings. Act fast and register before August 18th to receive an additional early-bird discount of $200 — that’s a total savings of $400!