“I would say to anybody doing a startup, especially from an investor perspective,” says Ben, “is invest in that third party research so it v

I got to sip on a very hot topic at the Business Growth Café with social media expert, author of Maximize Your Social, and social media agency owner, Neal Schaffer. Neal helped to reconfirm many of my maxims about social media marketing along with illuminating some new exciting territory that we all need to start venturing into if we aren’t already. If you don’t use it, you’ll lose it First things first: if you don’t use it, you won’t get it, and if you don’t get it, you’ll l

Developing messaging for your new campaign is simple, right? Identify the markets or categories you want to target, get to know the customer—his or her decision journey, motivations, pain points – then develop your brand message, slogan, creative and communications channels. Then market to them with a one-size-fits-all approach. Easy right? Wrong! Every year companies launch campaigns only to have them fail. Sometimes it’s the messaging that doesn’t speak to the needs of

You need to have detailed buyer/customer personas to understand their journey in order to have an effective lead gen program.

Know your customer. This has been my mantra since, well forever. I firmly believe you have to intimately know your customer. What motivates them; their behaviors, their needs, and their wants. What are their reasons for making a purchase decision? What is their decision journey? You have to understand the process they go through. To date myself, 15 to 20 years ago, the way to reach your customer was through product literature, advertising, and trade shows for example. But, bu

Developing and using buyer personas is a must these days. I don’t think anyone will disagree. The question becomes are companies, especially B2B organizations, investing the time and money necessary to create effective personas. According to a recent survey conducted by B2P Partners, 65% of those interviewed reported they believe their personas were ineffective and, 72% of them indicated they had not conducted any external research to contribute to the creation of their perso