Ardath Albee

I speak to a lot of B2B content marketers. It can be exhausting. Not speaking to them, of course, but hearing them talk about all the stuff on their plates. The list of To Dos is overwhelming. I'm truly worried that in trying to adopt the new mandates for continuous content development and distribution that we're going to start seeing major burnout.

The inspiration for this post goes to Eric Wittlake (@wittlake) who wrote a post about how social media is lowering our content standards. His premise is the more we feel the need to share content, the less interested we are in reading it. But additionally, that the pressure to churn it out is resulting in mediocre content development. Amen and Kudos to Eric for focusing the spotlight.

It's been a project to try and...

One of the things that gets forgotten during marketing content developed for website use is the impact of the presentation of the content within the "look and feel" of the web page it will be displayed on. The other is what's in it for the reader.

I just looked at a webpage that used the company's name 20 times on one page. They also used the primary keyword phrase for the subject matter focus 19 times. Sure, they have great organic search results for that phrase, but the disappointment is that the content didn't have any substance to it. After a couple of paragraphs it became tedious. But, that might have also been due to the amount of vague jargon and buzzwords that was included. The result; search optimized pablum.

This webpage is on the company's website. Their company name is in the banner, the domain name and several of their product names. It didn't need to be used 20X - people know where they are. But the true hindrance of overusing the company's name in...

With the advance of content marketing as a mainstay strategy for B2B marketers comes the inevitability of great expectations. But, I often encounter B2B marketers who are recounting their experiences with content marketing as not living up to expectations.

I hear things such as:

"Other email campaigns generate much higher click through and open rates than our lead nurturing program is achieving. It's just not working."

To which I inquire: What kind of email campaigns are you comparing with your nurturing program results?

The answer is usually related to eNewsletters or sales discount offers. These are two very different vehicles.

• An eNewsletter will generally have multiple offers and links with a variety of information. The recipient list can include both customers and prospects. I'd expect response rates to be different.
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• A sales discount offer is one of...

Today, I received an email from LinkedIn informing me that 86 of my contacts have started something new (read changed jobs or titles). That's about 17% of my total contacts - and that's ocurred since the first of the year, in less than 7 months.

How long have your leads been in your database? What percentage of them do you think have changed jobs, invalidating the information you have on file?

DemandGen Report conducted a survey in October of 2010 and, "found that more than 62% of organizations rely on marketing/prospect data that is 20 to 40% incomplete or inaccurate." Their CRM records are also pretty messy as respondents estimate that between 10% and 40% of the information is not worth the form it was entered from.

Just...