Need easy system for B2B content?

Need easy system for B2B content?

Use mine.

Your easy system for B2B content is available right here. Free. Not gated.

What works?

The best content focuses on a single, current industry hot button. For this, look at industry news and what jumps out.

Trending Examples in May/June 2023

  • Meta hit with $1.3 billion fine related to data privacy. Bad news sells. If you’re in (or near) a data-related vertical, you can generate weeks of content with this.
  • The sad state of unicorn valuations. If you’re in (or near) finance, capital or entrepreneurship this could be a great way to share your domain expertise.

Golden Rule for content creation…

Your content must help someone do their job better.

But take it a step deeper. What tangible benefits could be realized from consuming your content?

  • Less worrying, better sleep
  • Promotions, bonuses, salary increases
  • Increased job security

That’s why you’re creating!

You need an easy system for B2B content.

Happy man relaxing after marketing audit

Show your credibility first…your solution can wait

Remember, you’re promoting your credibility…not your company or solution. You are showing (not telling) your domain expertise, and your awareness of current trends and their implications.

You are building credibility for yourself, which dovetails nicely with what you’re selling. To whom do buyers turn when they’re in-market? Credible people.

Next steps to an easy system for B2B content

Creating truly intriguing tech & SaaS content is not difficult. Think through this short exercise, jotting down a few bullet points.

 

  • Background: usually a recent trend in your industry, vertical or market space around this topic.
  • Current challenge: a tech or SaaS challenge is almost always framed around wasted effort and/or money. Or reducing headaches significantly.
  • Your experience: “we’ve seen this happen with some customers”.
  • Your recommendation: Consider taking these steps.

Example – content for IT professionals

Your firm sells file management software to certain verticals. Here’s how you would create a piece for an enterprise data storage audience.

Background: Industries using large volumes of rich data for complex workflows are growing petabytes of unstructured data, which must be stored and retrieved on demand. Industries like oil and gas, entertainment, life sciences, and software development. End users cannot access the files they need without engaging their IT departments. This leads to soaring storage and IT costs for those companies.

Challenge: Data storage costs are skyrocketing and overburdened IT staffs need a way to push file management down to the business user. Allowing end users to determine what, when and where to archive data for later retrieval will help migrate data to lower cost storage and save time and expense for IT teams.

Frustrate IT pro, used to illustrate article on easy system for B2B content.

Your Experience: Today, we are seeing interesting software solutions that solve this problem beautifully. With ROI focused architectures, these solutions are ideal for companies with complex workflows using rich data files.

Your Recommendation: Take a look at solutions that offer cloud file management across multiple storage locations. Create a bullet list that, of course, highlights your expertise without ever mentioning the name of your company or product.

 

What will be your content consumer’s conclusion?

There’s no longer a mandate for IT departments to keep adding costly near term storage. Nor is it necessary for IT teams to bear the labor brunt of mediating between business users of data and storage archives.

Offer your audience next steps:

  • review the number and types of requests IT has received from end users
  • estimate the costs of answering these requests
  • use a break-even model to see if a 3rd party solution could save money

With those simple bullet points you have an outline for an article. And you’re on the way to creating top tech or SaaS content marketing.

What’s next?

Once you’re happy with the bullet points it’s time to write the article or delegate to someone else. If you delegate make sure it’s someone with domain expertise! Otherwise, you’ll spend more time educating the creator than it may be worth.Cartoon Snoopy on top of his doghouse typing

For written posts aim for 1,000 to 1,500 words. That’s when search engines take your content seriously.

Next, look at what you’ve created and think of a headline that grabs attention and boosts SEO.

Potential headlines for this article could be:

  • Overwhelmed By Unstructured Data? Here’s Good Medicine.
  • Need Relief For Your IT People?
  • The Unstructured Data Tsunami. Here’s How To Manage.

Final thoughts

Finally, notice how easily this can be tailored for different verticals. With search-and-replace editing, you now have insightful content for:

  • life sciences
  • entertainment
  • oil & gas
  • software development

You also have a solid foundation for a video or podcast!

Marketing audit for tech and SaaS

Marketing audit for tech and SaaS

Why a marketing audit for tech and SaaS companies?

    As we move along in 2023 I’m seeing more clients ask themselves ‘why are we doing what we’re doing?’. They ask that because they haven’t done a marketing audit for their tech or SaaS company.

    As a tech CMO, I always start with “well, what’s working and what’s not?”.

    Many of them just don’t know.

    Young business woman pondering a question, used to illustrate a marketing audit for tech and SaaS.

    If you don’t where to start, look at the info on my web page about marketing audits. This will give you a current foundation on how to go about a marketing audit for tech and SaaS companies.

    There are 3 brief audio/video overviews plus links to The 2023 CMO Survey and The 2023 State of B2B Marketing Budgets.

    Disclaimer: Yes, this page was created for a marketing audit service I offer. But it will show you how the pros do it.

    Pie chart populated with human figures, used to illustrate market segmentation.

    Marketing audits must be tailored to market segmentation

    Why change? Why now?

    Marketing audits for tech and SaaS companies answer these questions. Especially critical in 2023, a marketing audit shows:

    ✔︎ where are we wasting money?

    ✔︎ how should I focus the marketing budget?

    If your company is a going concern, a marketing audit is an essential first step to creating a marketing plan. How can you plan for next quarter or next year when you don’t know what’s working, and what’s not?

    Marketing audits for tech and SaaS are different

    Marketing audits for tech and SaaS companies are different because the B2B buyer has very different motivations than the B2C buyer.

    Yet, the tech and SaaS buyer has very different motivations than the office furniture buyer.

    Buyer personas in different industry verticals have different purchase preferences. So your marketing audit must be tailored to your vertical.

    What works for office furniture buyers typically won’t work for tech or SaaS buyers.

    What is the state of your marketing?

    A systematic appraisal of your marketing is a sure way to help you explain the marketing budget.

    Every business is its own ecosystem. Marketing presents your ecosystem to the marketplace, with incentives to engage and dive deeper.

    The best way to determine the state of your presentation and incentives is to do a marketing audit for your tech or SaaS company.

    Of course, allocating resources to do a proper audit is difficult for many companies.

    That’s where market strategy consulting firms like mine come in handy.

    Most of our marketing audits cost between $10K and $15K, depending on your company size.

    We complete them in two weeks.

    Feel free to check out the details on our web page.

    B2B go-to-market strategy

    B2B go-to-market strategy

    Enterprise software company wins big with B2B go-to-market strategy

    sales presentation best practices

    Logo DataFrameworks

    Overview

    How do you choose the right B2B go to market strategy?

    DataFrameworks, a Silicon Valley company had a unique solution for file management in enterprise data storage environments.

    Additionally, they used an often overlooked go t0 market strategy.

    A year after beginning work with Harris CMO Partners, they were acquired by DellEMC.

    Here’s the story.

    Founders recognized a trend

    The founders recognized a growing trend in the data storage space. Rich content (sound, video and images used at the same time and place) was overwhelming enterprise IT departments with petabytes of unstructured technical data and rich media content. There was no dedicated solution for allowing end users to access and retrieve massive rich content files from storage environments.

    Consequently, IT departments were overwhelmed with requests from end users to find and deliver rich content files. Besides, this increased the costs of storage management dramatically in companies that are heavy users of rich media files. Affected industries included media and entertainment, software development, life sciences and more.

    The trend was forecasted to keep growing for years.

    Image of tall data servers in the clouds.

    Where’s my data file?

    The challenge…

    Like most early stage B2B companies, DataFrameworks had a limited budget. Correspondingly, they decided to forgo marketing except for a website, focusing on B2B go to market strategy instead. Also, they minimized direct sales and focused on partnering with large OEMs in their market space. These included HGST, Quantum, DellEMC and others.

    Instead, they used a small sales team to call on the OEMs. And they chose us to do the partner marketing. Selling their solution to thousands of OEM salespeople would be a lot of specialized work. DataFrameworks needed a variety of support materials created to get their new, expanded OEM sales teams up and running.

    The solution…B2B go-to-market strategy

    Harris CMO Partners was hired to help. Working closely with the founders, sales and technical teams, we created architecture diagrams, solution briefs, business cases, sales presentations, sales kits, press releases, event marketing and more.

    The great thing about this client was that they knew precisely the business value of their solution. “Bringing business and IT together to unlock the value of data trapped in silos.” With that, and a couple of white papers they had created early on, we went to work.

    Shortly after we started working with DataFrameworks, they partnered with DellEMC. It was a perfect fit with Dell’s Isilon product line, a family of scale-out network-attached storage systems, designed for demanding enterprise file workloads.

    Isilon’s sales team already had relationships with the companies DataFramework wanted to target. Now, all DataFrameworks needed to do was educate and coach the DellEMC team.

    Their B2B go to market strategy was working well.

    The first customers…

    We decided to focus on large OEMs (like DellEMC) serving data intensive industries including media and entertainment, life sciences, oil and gas, EDA, software development, automotive and others with complex workflows.

    In their first phase of sales, they focused on acquiring a handful of marquee clients. These included Disney, ESPN, Quantum, IBM, NetApp, illumina, Sony Pictures and many more.

    B2B go-to-market strategy success

    I worked closely with both DataFrameworks and DellEMC to execute successfully the B2B go to market strategy.

    I created the sales and marketing story, sales training and plenty of intriguing content.

    Once DellEMC had the new solution firmly established as a partner offering with its existing customer base, sales materialized quickly.

    The tech giant saw distinct value in acquiring DataFrameworks and completed a succesful acquisition.

    DataFrameworks’ solution is currently featured in DellEMC’s Enterprise and Midmarket IT Transformation solutions.

    https://www.dell.com/en-us/blog/dell-emc-claritynow-data-management-software-helps-transform-data-value/

    More on strategy

    Market strategy is hugely critical to your success.

    You might like this article on how Steve Jobs outfoxed the major competition in his time.

    How Apple Competes…And Wins