Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More with Pam Didner. I haven’t done a lot of episodes lately. That’s because I was busy writing a novel! Yes, I’m writing a novel. I will tell you more little later in a different episode.

However, for this episode, I have a special guest for you, Agnes Fotino O’Connell, a Director of Sales Operations & Demand Generation for HMI Performance Incentive.

We met at the B2BMX Conference in February. Agnes came to my workshop, and we hit it off right there. At that time, I was talking about sales enablement. Agnes told me that’s something she’s been doing for quite some time now.

So, I invited Agnes to my podcast to talk specifically about a couple of things: how to better support sales and how to align sales and marketing for demand generation success.

A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina, and welcome to another B2B Marketing & More episode!

For this final episode of 2022, I will highlight some episodes I think are especially helpful for my B2B peeps and listeners. So let’s get started!

Since I love to travel, I thought I’d take you on a trip with me today. It’s a sales journey, but this includes some special stops. At each stop, an expert guest from this year will share tips and tricks to help you improve your sales and marketing chops and reach more ideal customers.

• Carla Johnson is a marketing and innovation strategist, keynote speaker, and author of ten books. In her latest book RE:Think Innovation, Carla breaks down the process that the world’s most prolific innovators use to consistently develop great ideas.
• AJ Wilcox specializes in paid ads for LinkedIn. AJ is a LinkedIn Ads Fanatic, host of The LinkedIn Ads Show, and founder of B2Linked, the Linkedin advertising agency.
• Ryan Staley is a sales professional, the CEO and the founder of Whale Boss. Ryan is a fantastic, high-performance salesperson who helps founders and revenue leaders implement 7 and 8 figure sales operating systems in less than three months.
• Erika Heald is a founder and the lead consultant at Erika Heald Marketing Consulting, Fractional Content Marketing Leader, and Executive Ghostwriter. Through her work, Erika helps many SaaS startups.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.

A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and more with Pam.

I have an exceptional guest, AJ Wilcox. AJ specializes in paid ads for LinkedIn. He is a LinkedIn Ads Fanatic, host of The LinkedIn Ads Show, and founder of B2Linked, the Linkedin advertising agency.

Here are practical tips for running LinkedIn ads.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.

When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

Hello, this is Pam. Welcome to another pandemic episode of B2B Marketing and More.

IN this episode I am going to talk about a question I received after attending the Social Media Strategies Summit “Ask Anything” webinar. Here is the question from Lauren:

I work for a non-profit organization. In the current situation, what’s the appropriate way to ask for donations? or is it not at all?

Lauren, I love your question. Frankly, I can modify this question for salespeople: I need to reach out to prospects to build up my sales pipelines, is it appropriate to do cold prospecting or not at all?

So the truth is, we are all asking ourselves the same questions and trying to figure out what is appropriate for our own target markets and audiences. We are all looking for answers and trying to figure out appropriate actions.   We’re asking what is the right thing to do, even myself.

So before answering Lauren’s question I shared this blog post with her. The name sof the blog post is 5 Media Principles Guiding Google’s Media Team in the Wake of the COVID-19 outbreak from Joshua Spanier. He made it very clear that there is no playbook for times like these, I 100% agree. So here is what he’s found is that crisis can provide clarity.

Here are the 5 principles that his media team follows and I thought it applies to marketing and sales teams:

1. Context, always: You need to ask yourself: “In what instances are you comfortable putting your brands alongside news content?” “Do people care about your products at this time?” If your products can help them, how can they help at this time? Can you put it in the right context? Context is everything.

1. Constantly reassess: Things change on a daily basis. You need to stay on top of it. Most of us have some sort of editorial planning. For myself, we plan our editorial 1-2 weeks in advance. I have clients plan their content planning 6-8 months in advance. Given that things change on a regular basis, what we plan one week ago may not apply now. We can pre-schedule your communications, but be prepared to make changes the last minutes, because it may no longer be appropriate today.

1. Creative consideration: Given that Joshua manages the global media team, creative does matters. For all of us, both creative and copywriting matter. What we say, how we say and what images or videos we use to illustrate that our points are more important than ever. The way we communicate need to be sympathetic, respectful, and supportive. Our creative and copywriting needs to reflect that. Many B2B marketers are so accustomed to buttoned up communications (me included), but now is the time to be up close and personal.

1. Constant priority changes: B2B marketers are so used to planning (I’m talking about me!). We plan our product launches months in advance. We start planning 6-8 months before our big events. Our editorial is likely to be planned out 2-4 weeks in advance. Well, you know what? Planning still matters. But we need to be nimble enough that we need to re-align with ever changing priorities from management. It’s not that they want to make changes, but a situation requires them to do that. We just need to be cognizant of that.

1. Contribution and be helpful: When you are online, you’ll notice a great many SaaS-based platforms are offering their platforms for free. Many paid courses and books are free as well. Some organizations are donating their time and money to help front-line workers or fund pandemic research. All these can be talking points that you can share as a part of marketing communications, but be careful how you phrase it. And another thing is pricing changes or product offering change impact messaging, sales talking points, even content and copy we show on our websites and social media channels. It means that we need to update our webpages, and refresh or update our content everywhere. It’s a lot of work and can be overwhelming. I get it.

I told Lauren there are two principles that are critical for her to be aware of: put it in the right context and be helpful. Is there way she can think of reaching out to her donors in the right context? If she can’t think of anything on her own, can she brainstorm with her team or management? Get others to help her come up with creative ideas. Again, put it in the right context.

In this trying time, what we say and how we say it matters. I told Lauren that she knows her donors well, she needs to trust her gut on how and what is the best way to reach out at this time. 

BTW, I also shared the following ‘excerpt with her. This is a response to a question on Reddit that’s similar to Lauren’s. This marketing manager is in the travel and hospitality industry which has been very heavily hit by the pandemic. What he or she said resonates with me. Here is the excerpt from Reddit user: LobsterOnTheLand

“I'm in the tourism business in Central America. The outlook is pretty grim for the short term. Realistically, no one will be traveling until next fall at the soonest - and even then tourism will be WAY down. We've decided that marketing and promoting our trips aren't the best choice right now - it won't make us look good, and no one is thinking about traveling anyway. Instead, we're doing a few other things:

- Reaching out to customers who have trips planned with us through the end of 2020 and updating them on the travel status in our country, and how their trip will be affected. It's important to keep people updated.

- Reaching out to good (repeat) customers and just wishing them well in this difficult time.

- Working on promotional content and website updates that we can use a few months from now when the time is right.

- Mostly we are just slacking off though, because there isn't a whole hell of a lot to do, and profits will be almost nil this year.”

Honestly, I don’t know how LobsterOnTheLand and his or her company is going to make it, but what he or she said resonates with me.

If you are struggling, just be aware that everyone is struggling as well. We are trying to pivot and do something different. We’ll make mistakes, but we will adapt and learn along the way.

Hang in there, my friends. Reach out if you have any questions.

Stay healthy and be well. Take care.

Hello, this is Pam. I hope that everything is safe and sound and that working from home has not driven you completely insane just yet. It’s certainly added a lot of pressure to those who not only have to work full-time but also have to homeschool their kids and deal with the various aspects of home confinement. 

Today I’m going to talk about something different. 52 Limited is a Portland-based marketing recruiting firm. They launched a virtual get-together that they call ‘10 minutes with 52.’ Three days a week they invite different experts to talk about various topics for 10 minutes at a time before you start your day. What a lovely idea. I was invited to talk about "Personal Branding."

Based on my experience building a digital presence for my personal brand, here are the five key lessons I shared to help you build your personal brand.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Hi, everyone. Just want to mention that I recorded this episode before the Coronavirus pandemic. I know that it’s going to be a stressful time for all of us. I do hope that you’ll find time to relax and get a sense of normality from listening to my episodes. Be safe and stay healthy, my friends.

I was interviewing a marketing director of my clients a few days ago to help them build a collaboration process between the B2B Marketing Group and the Sales Enablement Team. During the interview, the Marketing Director made it very clear to me that B2B marketing should reside with the Corporate Marketing Team and should be part of the marketing function.

You know what? I understand where she is coming from. Earlier this year, there was a talk that B2B marketing should be part of the sales team given that they are supporting business accounts and corporate sales. 

Well, I can see both sides. Marketing wants to have the B2B Marketing Team as a part of their teams and the Sales Team feel that all the B2B Marketing dollars are coming from them so B2B Marketing should be part of corporate sales.

Organizations often struggle with which part of the group should belong where. Sales enablement is a great example.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Hi, everyone! I'm doing something different for this episode in light of the effect of the coronavirus pandemic in our industry.

Today, I'm sharing an excerpt from a webinar I did on March 18, with a focus on how to keep your marketing moving in times of uncertainty. I teamed up with Ryan Lewis, a good friend of mine at Bonfire Marketing. At the end of today's episode, I will have details on what else you can learn in the webinar and how to watch it.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Hello, everyone. In the past several episodes, I’ve been discussing AI’s role in Marketing. As I’ve been talking about all the wonderful magic of AI, you might ask, “What’s the catch?” Well, there is a dark side. If you use machine learning as a way to implement AI, you need to make sure you have high-quality data first.

Whenever I mention data, marketers are like “WHAT?” I was like “WHAAAAT? I know, right? Data is really the marketers’ nemesis. So the quality of data: you need to define in terms of the quality of your data and also your data sources.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Hello everyone! So, I wrote a little eBook about AI—Artificial Intelligence--which is available on Amazon. Simply type “Pam Didner” or the name of the book “The Modern AI Marketer”. Download it to your Kindle and check it out. Love to hear your feedback!

I mentioned in my last podcast that I wrote this book to help myself and others understand how AI fits into the field of Marketing. In the eBook, I mentioned six use cases. For today’s podcast, I want to talk about three or so that you can get a sense of it how AI applies to Marketing.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Hello everyone! Last week, I shared with you that I wrote a little eBook about AI that you can purchase on Amazon Kindle. Just in case you missed last week’s podcast, the name of the book is called The Modern AI Marketer: How to Leverage Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing.

The book was written for marketers to understand what AI is and how marketers can apply it in the work they do. Like I said last week, modern marketing is grounded on using technology to reach out to your audience digitally.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Good morning, everyone! I have super exciting news to share with you. I wrote a little eBook about AI—Artificial Intelligence. Yeah!

Here’s the thing: when I’ve spoken at conferences in the past, it’s been clear to me that marketers are intimidated by AI and don’t know what to make of it. AI piqued my interest when I was doing research for the Technology chapter of my 2nd book, Effective Sales Enablement. Ever since my fascination has skyrocketed.

To help marketers and sales teams better understand AI, I wrote a 9000-word Kindle ebook: The Modern AI Marketer: How to Leverage Artificial Intelligence in Digital Marketing to Get Ahead.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Good morning, everyone! I’ve been doing several webinars and podcast interviews in the past 5 weeks. I found one question particularly interesting. That was from Jeff, CEO of MarketMuse. He asked me: “What are some examples of questions I ask to understand my salespeople?”

If you are working with your sales team and don’t have a good relationship with them just yet, here are some questions that you can ask to get to know them. It’s worked well for me and I want to share it with you.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Hello from Portland. This week is one of those weeks when I have several pressing client deliverables. On top of that, I also need to create several podcast and video recordings.

Speaking of creating content, here is a LinkedIn message from Queenie who lives in Hong Kong.

She said: Hi Pam, I continually read your blogs and find them useful as I am in the B2B marketing field and specialize in the Asia Pacific market. Shall we connect so I can be informed about new articles?

Of course, Queenie! I’d love to connect, I answered. In response, she added one quick question:  When it comes to content marketing, I understand many in-house experts can contribute content but they might not write it in a customer-oriented way. For a tech startup company, what is your take on outsourcing the content writing vs getting a copywriter in-house? 

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Hey, big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing and More with Pam.

I have a very good friend joining me, Robert Rose, Chief Strategist of Content Marketing Institute. Robert and I have known each other for at least, I would say, 10 years.

Today, we are going to talk about our favorite topic - the B2B buyers.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Good Morning from Portland, Oregon.

I have a confession to make. I travel a lot and most of my clients are not in Portland, Oregon. The truth is that I don’t know many local marketers. So, I attended a networking event the other day and I had the opportunity to talk to several local marketers.

One of the young marketers I met, Ken, asked me an interesting question: How do I know if a marketing career is right for me?

He received a marketing job offer after he graduated from college. The job is not exactly what he expected; therefore, he started questioning whether this is the right career path for him. The question he poses is perfectly legit, especially if you don’t particularly enjoy what you are doing.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Good Morning from Portland!

I received an email from Kate. In her email, she mentioned that she’s been an account manager for several companies. She started as a Sr. Account Manager with a new company a year ago. From her perspective in this role, she’s identified a large gap in marketing and sales collaboration; so her manager asked her to create a new role to address these gaps. She read my book and loved it. Thank you, Kate! She wanted to have a chat to discuss how to better define her new job. 

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope that you had a great holiday and are well-rested. 

As a marketer, if your company’s marketing plan for the new year is done, I’d strongly recommend you do one thing, tie your job contribution to your Company’s business goals and marketing objectives and do that in one page. This is especially important for a marketing specialist, an individual contributor or a first-line manager.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

If you are a long-time listener, you know that my episodes tend to focus on marketing and business, not so much about me. I am going to be up close and personal today as I record the last episode of 2019, I decided to do a little self-reflection, a look back to my 2019.

Frankly, this year didn’t start very well, business-wise. I didn’t tell many people, but my pipeline was bone dry the first 5 months. I had speaking engagements and small projects here and there, but nothing steady or substantial.

I was so scared that I started considering going back to be a full-time corporate citizen. You know how you are hitting a wall and can’t break through and you don’t know what the next steps are. That’s how I felt earlier this year for several months.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

If you listen to my podcast on a regular basis, you know that I am not affiliated with any tools or platforms. Occasionally, I mentioned certain tools and platforms for my listeners to check out if they are dealing with specific marketing or sales challenges.

For social media, I’ve been using ‘Buffer’ for several years. However, a good friend, Lisa, introduced me to a tool called ‘Lately’ to me. This tool has the functionality of Buffer, but at the same time, it uses AI to autogenerate social media posts for you. You can quickly pick your favorites or edit the posts, then schedule. You can choose how and when you want them to post, or have Lately’s AI schedule for you based on your audience engagement history. You can seamlessly stockpile your post with hashtags and short links. Lately will send them as scheduled to help drive traffic back to your website.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

In talking to many of my clients, I’ve found that there often doesn’t seem to be a nurturing stream to address leads rejected by the sales team. In some cases, these leads are not even routed back to the marketing automation system. When they are routed back, they are just treated like any other leads as part of regular email campaigns.

During one of my workshops, an attendee asked me if we should have a separate nurturing stream for rejected leads. If we do, how should we segment rejected leads?

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

I did an 8-hour-long workshop for a new client of mine. The CMO of the company, Sara, is an incredibly savvy marketer in the B2C segment. Anything about marketing a luxury brand, she is on top of it.

One of her key initiatives in 2020 is to work and enable sales. In the workshop, we identified sales stages, mapped content from marketing to sales, and created a series of email campaigns to help outside sales engage with SQLs. We also created a drip campaign to continue engagement with prospects after events.

She asked me what is the difference between the Drip and Nurture campaigns.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

In the last episode, I mentioned that I met Danny Harris at Content Marketing World. He’s a regular listener to my podcast. Thank you, Danny! We did a Zoom meeting a couple of weeks after the conference. Danny is amazing. He created several nice frameworks to tie the customer journey, marketing channels and sales stages together. I am very impressed with his work. Thank you for sharing, Danny.

I asked him if he had any questions that he wants me to address in my podcast. He had a fundamental question: “Why do we need to invest in B2B marketing?”

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Well, I was at Content Marketing World and trying to get ready for my session. A big and tall gentleman, Danny Harris, approached me and said, “Pam, you’ve changed your podcast title and logo.”

I was like, “What?” Someone actually noticed that I changed my podcast title from "7 Minute Marketing with Pam" to "B2B Marketing and More with Pam Didner."  Wow!! I was shocked. Danny said: “Yeh, I listened to your podcast.” OMG, I actually met a listener in person the first time. I was jumping up and down in front of him and gave him the biggest hug. He probably thought I was crazy.

Danny and I started chatting and he asked me why I decided to make the podcast title and branding change. Now, since he asked, let me take a moment to share with you why I decided to make the change. 

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Cindy is a newly promoted VP of Marketing for a manufacturing company. She knows how to get things done, but she tends to get deep into the weeds. That’s because, for a long time, her job was about getting things done. You can give her any marketing tactics and she would find a way to implement them. Now that she is a newly minted VP of Marketing, she is unable to pull herself out of the tactical level and instead focuses on structuring a high-level budget plan discussion with her manager, who is the VP of Sales.

The first thing she sent me was her budget file with a laundry list of marketing expenses. Ok, that’s not the thing I want to see. The first thing I wanted to see is her marketing plan. I used her input to create the first draft.

Here is what a simple one-page marketing plan can look like.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

A big hello from Raleigh, North Carolina. In today's episode of B2B Marketing & More, I explain how to set up an efficient and cohesive Martech stack.

I'll guide your thinking approach and break down key steps that you can take to tackle this hairy issue.

Here's what you need to do to navigate martech stack.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

In the last episode, I talked about how to be a strategic thinker in the context of B2B marketing. I shared three ideas:

1. Think from the perspective of “why and what”, not “how”
2. Communicate in a way that senior managers can understand
3. Help senior managers connect the dots

For this episode, I want to talk about how to cultivate that strategic thinking capability. I truly believe that skill set can be acquired. I am using myself as an example. I wouldn’t consider myself a natural strategic thinker. 

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

A big hello from Portland, Oregon.

How can I think strategically? How to cultivate strategic thinking?

Strategic is such a big word. Whenever I think of the term “Strategic Thinking,” I picture a politician or policymaker in a Think Tank trying to craft big initiatives to tackle issues like climate change, unemployment, boosting the economy, etc.

For the sake of today’s podcast, I want to narrow the definition of strategic thinking a little bit in the context of B2B marketing. Let’s keep it concrete: how can you carry on productive and interactive conversations with your CEO, VP of marketing, and other senior staff?

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

So, I spent several episodes talking about how to create a solid messaging framework and I shared templates in Ep 101, 102, 103 and 104. For today, I want to share a personal story and talk about how to prioritize your workload when you and your team are overworked and understaffed?

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

For today’s episode, I want to continue the series on how to create a solid messaging framework. I know that this is a niche topic in marketing.

Not everyone is creating messaging or talking points. This may not be your job. As a modern marketer, I think it’s important to have a holistic view of marketing is done. Messaging creation, in a way, is as important as content creation or storytelling.

For this episode, I want to talk about messaging framework for secondary or low-cost/low volume or low-cost/high volume products. I have several listeners who asked me: “Pam, my company sells many products. Do I need to create a messaging doc for every product?”

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Messaging and positioning are the most under-rated tasks in marketing. Worse, crafting messaging is just not as much fun as creative development, story-telling, or content creation. I know. 

Yet, messaging is the crucial and vital foundation for external communications and internal sales training. You may not create a messaging framework, but it doesn’t hurt to get a sense of what it is and what elements should be included in a messaging template. The more you know about different aspects of marketing, the more you can connect the different sales and marketing dots.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

In the EP101, I talked about what is a messaging framework. A messaging framework is a logical and structured representation of your products’ and services’ unique promises and differentiation.

For today’s episode, I want to talk about a messaging template. It’s very hard to talk about a temple on a podcast because I can’t do a show-and-tell in front of you. You can’t really see the template. This is probably not your job, but it doesn’t get a sense of how it’s done.

So, you need to visualize it and follow along, OK?

For a messaging template you can create, you need to start with a product.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Messaging and positioning are the most under-rated tasks in marketing. Worse, crafting messaging is just not as much fun as creative development, story-telling, or content creation. I know. 

Yet, messaging is a crucial and vital foundation for external communications and internal sales training.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

A neighbour kid asked me What is B2B Marketing? B2B Marketing used to be called Trade Advertising or Industrial Advertising many years ago. Over time, marketers changed the term to B2B marketing, which sounds a lot classier. 

Many people may think that marketing is just marketing. Basically, we are marketing products and services, so why does it matter if it’s B2B or B2C? Well, marketers use the same channels to promote products regardless of whether it’s for business or consumer products. Marketing channels are the same, but the approaches to business and consumers are different.

There are 5 differences that guide the approaches.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Hi, everyo

So, here are the key takeaways:

• Understand how your farmers receive knowledge. Document the journeys and create your content according to them. Make your content and information available to them.
• Understand how your farmers buy. Identify their touch points and contacts and see how you can leverage them.

If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

I decided to attend VidCon in Anaheim this July. It was one of the few events that I went to as an attendee, not as a speaker. VidCon is short for Video Conference. I first read about VidCon several years ago and thought it was such a genius idea to create an event that brings YouTube Celebrities to their fans, a niche that was not being fulfilled.

Someone was quick enough to seize that opportunity and created an event for it. It turned out that that someone and his brother are Hank and John Green. You may have heard of John Green who is also the author of the book I love, the Fault in Our Stars, a NYT bestselling book and a popular movie. In 2018, they sold this event to ViaCom. I am sure that Hank and John are doing very well financially. 

Here is the key reason I attended the event: I’m always curious about how consumer brands market to younger generations. VidCon is a great option for me to understand younger demographics, to see various brands’ approaches to reach out to the next generation of millennials, and to check out video content creators, YouTubers.

Nike, Facebook, Instagram, Nickelodeon, NBC Universal, Mountain Dew Game Fuel and more all had big exhibit spaces at the Expo Hall. It was challenging to win young audiences’ mind shares on-site. Every brand was working very hard to make sure their booths stood out.

If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Hello, and welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. I have a special guest today: Erika Heald. She's a founder and the lead consultant at Erika Heald Marketing Consulting, where she helps a lot of SaaS startups.

Today we talk about B2B thought leadership in the context of B2B marketing specifically. What makes it essential for marketers and companies, and why do they need to be aware of generating thought leadership.

Tune in to learn how to build B2B thought leadership.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

A listener of this podcast, Chris, posted a question: What is the best way to integrate branding and messaging into sales? How can marketing help sales stay 'on brand'?

- Define brand and branding

- Be part of sales onboarding and training

- Bring messaging to sales

Following brand guidelines and messaging helps salespeople stay on-brand. And the best way to share that information is to be part of sales communications, onboarding and training. 

If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

I have huge respect for sales people. I do! Personally, I don’t think that I am cut out to be a sales rep. The reason is that I don’t take rejection well, I take it personally, as if it’s my fault. So being told “no, thanks” 20-30 times every day is going to crush me. Needless to say, I haven’t been doing cold calls.

- It's time to increase my sales pipeline

- Find an expert to assist me

- Identify Ideal Customer Profile, their pain points and challenges and my offerings

- Change my new headline, tagline, LinkedIn profile

- Carefully orchestrate the sequence of email for cold calls

If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

A client I haven’t talked to for 2 years texted me on Monday. She asked me if we can get together for a cup of coffee. I am so glad to hear from Harriet. She was the chief of staff and operations manager for a business unit in a global enterprise.  I helped her create keynote presentations for her general manager, Jeff, and I even helped her build the internal communications process. Once I created several keynote presentations and established the internal communication process, she just ran with it. Through the grapevine, I know that she is doing well.

Jeff promoted her to be the director of marketing several months ago. I sent a short note of congratulations. She was super-excited about the opportunity, even though Harriet doesn’t have marketing experience. However, Jeff was willing to coach Harriet and help her ramp up on sales and marketing. Plus, Harriet is a fast learner. With proper coaching, she should be fine. 

Unfortunately, Jeff left the company right after he promoted Harriet. So a new general manager, Tom, was hired to replace Jeff. Tom has solid operations, finance and product experience, but doesn’t know much about marketing. Tom relies on Harriet to articulate what his marketing team does for the group. However, Harriet, without a strong marketing background or experience, has a hard time articulating her team’s contribution. she asked me if I can help her on a couple things:

1. Articulate her team’s value-add and contributions to Tom
2. Help her create a 2020 marketing plan 

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

I was asked a question the other day. How do you know that you are a true digital marketer? That’s a great question. The truth is there is no way to measure your digital knowledge per se. There is no test that you can take. The breadth and depth of your digital knowledge and expertise is based on your personal experience. In addition, digital technology is changing every day. There is no baseline that you can gauge against.

To make it more complicated, digital knowledge can also be categorized into different fields from website design, search optimization, paid social media buy, retargeting paid ads down to personalization and data analytics. No one person can be an expert at all of it.

Personally, I’d evaluate a person’s digital knowledge based on an ability to ‘connect the dots’.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Hey, it’s Pam Didner here. So happy to do another episode of 7 Min Marketing from Portland, Oregon. 

About a month ago, Carter Hostelley, President of LeadTail, hosted a dinner for his friend, Ted Ruben, who came to Portland to emcee a marketing event at Intel. He invited me to be part of that dinner and asked me to share my thoughts on overall content marketing trends. Just an informal chat. It was a very intimate dinner gathering with 8-10 marketing professionals. We talked about marketing trends, shared personal stories or just whatever topics that happened to come up at that time. Delicious meals. Great wine. Excellent conversations. Just what a great dinner party should be!

It was fun to see Carter again as I haven’t seen him for almost 2 years. The last time I met him, he had just moved to Portland from San Francisco. I asked him how he’s been doing. He told me that he has been super-busy. It turns out that he’s been doing quite well in the past 2 years and has grown his agency to almost 20 people. Dang. Well-done, Carter. And very impressive. So I asked him what any consultant or small business owner would ask: “How do you find your customers and prospects?”

To my surprise. Carter told me that he doesn’t do typical outbound marketing. Ok, that’s intriguing, If you don’t do outbound marketing, how do you get your prospects? His answer was one word: “Community.”

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time. 

One of the mandatory requirements for modern marketers is to understand the technology side of marketing, or martech. Modern marketing can’t function without technology. There are technologies and platforms behind any digital communications and even for offline marketing. Just take Facebook ads as an example. They have evolved so much, from simple banner ads to processes like using messenger to share content and timely updates with your subscribers. Social media platforms are continually evolving and coming up with new and creative ways to sell ad space. To help manage those techniques, new platforms and tools are being created all the time to manage the new capabilities. You require technology upon technology to manage your marketing efforts. You can’t just launch one tool, check it off the list, expect everything works the same anymore.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam.

My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time.

Chris asked me this holy-grail question: how can marketing help sales and vice versa?

Well, the question is very abstract. Let’s bring it down a notch. Marketing can do many things to help sales.

The question is what marketing wants to do to help sales and whether sales agree that it would be helpful. 

In many cases, marketing helps sales build a pipeline, which means getting potential leads or marketing qualified leads for sales.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time.  Ok, this is Episode 90. I can’t believe that I am only 10 episodes away from 100. It’s certainly been a journey.

Here are 3 big lessons learned from doing 90 episodes.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

I received a question from Keri. She just joined a big tech company. Her job is to enable sales. sales. But there is a catch: she is not part of the established sales enablement team. She is part of the corporate marketing team. When we talked, she was 3 weeks into her job and was not sure what her job is. She feels that there is duplication between her role and that of the sales enablement team, even though her manager assures her that this is not the case.

Here is what I told her based on a quick 15 min conversation.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

What is the main requirement to be a digital marketer? I’ve been asked that question often by traditional marketers. The way I define traditional marketers is that they are marketing professionals who are not digital natives and didn’t start their marketing careers on the digital side.

I usually tell them that the key difference between traditional and modern marketers is the ability to think in multi-channels in a sense of integrated marketing and to understand the technology behind-the-scenes. By the way, these two are related. If you understand how technology works and integrates, you’ll have a holistic view of your company’s marketing and can think strategically by connecting different marketing dots. 

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Welcome to another episode, B2B Marketing & More. I have an exceptional guest today: Janet Driscoll Miller. Janet is the author of Data-First Marketing, President and CEO of Marketing Mojo.

Today Janet shares data-first marketing tips and how to put data at the beginning of what businesses need to do.

Learn more about a modern approach to data-driven business.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

I had an epiphany talking to Rob Clarke, co-founder of Strala, at Martech West in early April. His company created a turnkey platform that allows you to standardize UTM parameters to track all your online and offline marketing outreach. He told me that marketers like to ask 3 questions: who, what and when.

Marketing focuses on Who, What, and When 

• Who are they?
• What did they do throughout their buying journey?
• When did they do it?

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time. 

In my previous episode, I talked about the importance of keeping up with marketing technology. One of the best ways I mentioned is to talk to various vendors at marketing conferences. When I went to Martech West in the San Jose Convention Center early April, I did my rounds and talked to different vendors. I am not affiliated with any of these vendors but I want to tell you about 3 vendors that caught my eye and share with you what they offer.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. 

Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time. 

In my workshops, one of the key points that I emphasize all the time is the importance of understanding marketing technology. In my 2nd book, Effective Sales Enablement, I even dedicated one whole chapter to technology and its impact on marketers supporting sales.

We all know technology is important, we use it every day. But, as a marketer, we are overwhelmed by the continuing evolution of technology and have a hard time keeping up.

Here are 3 ways that you can keep up with martech.

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If you want to chat, reach out on any social media channels or email me at hello@pamdidner.com.

You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead.