B2B Marketing and More With Pam Didner – Details, episodes & analysis

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.