Description

To succeed at B2B marketing today, you must excel across all areas: from getting your message out, to generating demand, to enabling sales teams. New technologies and new techniques make excellence possible. Now, top B2B marketer Kim Ann King brings together all the best practices and tools you need to make excellence real.

 

In The Complete Guide to B2B Marketing, King helps you succeed by focusing on the three pillars of cutting-edge B2B marketing: automation, personalization, and experimentation. Drawing on her pioneering experience at companies like Akamai and Open Market, King shows how to: 

• Systematically assess your context and customer, via personas, profiles, and other powerful techniques
• Choose among today's panoply of marketing options, tools, and techniques
• Build a more agile B2B marketing organization, and link its goals more tightly to strategy
• More accurately estimate marketing spend and ROI
• Systematically optimize demand generation and many other key functions
• Leverage higher-value approaches to web/mobile, SEO, and customer community-building
• Gain more value from corporate standards and your creative services vendors
• Discover what worked and what didn't, and use this knowledge to improve more quickly

King provides comprehensive, actionable resources, including best-practices checklists for every tactic, vendor checklists for evaluating new marketing technologies, a complete corporate marketing plan outline, and a start-to-finish marketing communications case study.

Features

How to excel across ALL areas of modern B2B marketing: from getting your message out, to generating demand, to enabling your sales teams 

• The first B2B marketing guide that combines unparalleled breadth of knowledge, depth of insight, and practical value
• Fully leverage marketing automation, personalization, and experimentation to build competitive advantage
• Master new best practices and best tools for planning, analysis, strategy, visibility, demand generation, budgeting, and more
• Packed with insider interviews, best practices checklists, and expert guidance on evaluating new technologies
• By a leading practitioner with 30 years of experience and a front-row seat at the frontiers of technology-driven B2B marketing

Table of Contents

Foreword   xii
Preface   xvi
Introduction   1
Part I: Trends   5
Chapter 1: The Evolving Marketing Landscape   7
Part II: Tools and Technologies   15
Chapter 2: Strategy and Evaluation   17
Chapter 3: Analytics   25
Chapter 4: Experimentation and Optimization   43
Chapter 5: Marketing Automation   59
Chapter 6: Targeting and Personalization   81
Part III: Tactics and Techniques   91
Chapter 7: Planning   93
Chapter 8: Programming, Part 1: Brand Awareness   107
Chapter 9: Programming, Part 2: Demand Generation   137
Chapter 10: Programming, Part 3: Organizational Enablement   187
Chapter 11: Budgeting   195
Chapter 12: Staffing   199
Chapter 13: Measuring   207
Chapter 14: Conversations with B2B Marketing Experts   213
Chapter 15: Summary   237
Part IV: Appendices   241
Appendix A: Marketing Plan Outline   243
Appendix B: An Examination of the Marketing Communications Tools and Techniques Used by Akamai Technologies During Its Sponsorship of NetAid   245
Index   255

Back Cover

“The Complete Guide to B2B Marketing gives readers practical advice on everything they need to keep up with today’s evolving digital marketing techniques. Kim lays out the key trends, technologies, and how they fit into the larger marketing process. Read this book and become a better marketer!”
--Eric J. Hansen, Founder and CEO, SiteSpect, Inc. (www.sitespect.com)

“Kim distills her hands-on marketing expertise into a comprehensive guide of real-world tips and best practices. From brand awareness, demand generation, and organizational enablement to the technology that supports these endeavors, this book covers every facet of today’s B2B marketing function. A must-read for professionals.”
--George Kassabgi, Founder, CEO, and Angel Investor

“Learn how to attain visibility, credibility, and preference for your company, solutions, and services in this useful, up-to-date guidebook.”
--Tom Murphy, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Bradford Networks (www.bradfordnetworks.com)

“A soup-to-nuts guide on marketing to businesses today. Super helpful, full of actionable advice, and highly recommended.”
--Mark Slater, Entrepreneur and Technology Company Advisor
 
“This is a terrific and practical handbook for any marketer who wants to apply contemporary marketing methods.”
--Jeff Winsper, President, Winsper (www.winsper.com)

Today, B2B marketers must excel across all areas, from messaging to demand generation to sales team enablement. New technologies and techniques make excellence possible. This book makes it real.

Top B2B marketer Kim Ann King will help you profit from cutting-edge B2B analytics, experimentation and optimization, marketing automation, targeting and personalization, and more. Drawing on decades of experience at pioneers such as SiteSpect, Akamai, and Open Market, she helps you assess fast-changing customers...choose your best tools and options...build a more agile, strategy-driven plan...hire the right team...drive more value from experimentation...accurately estimate spend and ROI.

If you’re a B2B marketer, you’ll wish you had this guide years ago. You’ll be thrilled you have it today.

As a B2B marketer, you face greater challenges than ever before. You must transform your  messages, offers, and channels--continually.  You must become fluent with technologies that did not exist a few years ago. And everything you do must tightly align with strategy, so you don’t automate bad marketing and make  bigger mistakes faster!

Today, success requires new knowledge and  new street smarts. Pioneering B2B marketer  Kim Ann King delivers both.

King reveals what’s now possible and  demystifies the key tools and techniques that make it happen. Next, she presents proven  strategies, tactics, and best practices for applying them at each step of the conversion funnel.

Even if you’re more “qualitative” than  “quantitative,” King helps you leverage new tools for analytics, experimentation, marketing automation, and targeting and personalization. You’ll discover new ways to generate demand, build brand visibility and credibility, and empower your entire marketing and sales organizations.

Understand the trends
New buyers, channels, platforms, tools, and data sources...and no new budget

Master the tools
Analytics, experimentation and optimization, marketing automation, and targeting and personalization

Optimize your marketing lifecycle
Plan, program, staff, budget, measure, and more

Learn from the experts
Get practical tactics and career advice from  six world-class B2B marketers

Put it all together
People, tools, goals, strategies, and tactics: align them all for success
 

Author

Kim Ann King serves as the Chief Marketing Officer of SiteSpect, Inc. (www.sitespect.com), a leading web and mobile optimization solutions provider. There, she is responsible for brand awareness, demand generation, and organizational enablement initiatives. King is the founder of New Leaf Communications, a boutique marketing consultancy. Over the past three decades, she has built high-tech B2B brands and helped to launch several Internet companies. Her high-impact, cost-effective marketing initiatives have consistently achieved brand recognition, marketplace differentiation, and customer acquisition and loyalty at companies including Bit9, Akamai Technologies, and Open Market. King has authored numerous articles on e-commerce, marketing, and optimization. She holds an M.S. in Communications Management from Simmons College and a B.S. in Public Relations with honors from Boston University.

Follow Kim on Twitter: http://twitter.com/kimannking.