B2B Nation

What makes managing people so difficult? It’s probably that we’re all different. But in the business world, we ask our leaders to manage teams of people: each with their own needs, wants, styles and personalities. It’s a big ask, and the larger the team, the larger the challenge.

Whether you’re an experienced manager of people or early in your leadership career, leading your team became a lot more challenging in 2020. Individual styles and personalities carried over into remote work and affected how people dealt with their own health, as well as the health and safety of their families and friends.

In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to James Sherer. In addition to working on his PhD in business administration, James is an executive with the retail arm of Marathon Petroleum, which most people know as the Speedway brand. He’s also involved in a pair of entrepreneurial ventures: Salesology, which aims to help align marketing and sales, and Eventology, which applies a project management framework to event management and production.

One thing that was clear from our conversation is that there is good news for marketers managing people. Many of the skills you use in your marketing can help you effectively manage your team. Talking to people and promoting ideas is messaging and content creation. Managing people, like marketing, isn’t one size fits all. And that empathy you had to develop talking to your customers in 2020? It can come in handy as you lead your team through an unpredictable 2021.

It seems like we hear most about the manufacturing sector when we’re being told about the trouble it’s in. Politicians bemoan the loss of manufacturing jobs. Local economies suffer when manufacturers close their doors or re-locate their plants.

Manufacturing in the US is not without challenges. The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) will tell you, however, that manufacturing output in the US has risen pretty consistently over the past decade.

If you work in B2B marketing, or aspire to work in B2B marketing, there are some interesting things happening in the manufacturing sector that are worthy of your attention.

First, digital transformation is taking hold in manufacturing, and it’s upending decades-old business models. In the past, manufacturers often sold through distributors. That meant brand awareness and end-user customer experience were not priorities for many manufacturers. But as manufacturers increasingly turn to the Internet to sell direct to customers, all of that is changing.

In addition to transformation, there’s the global pandemic, which as it has in other sectors, is acting as an accelerant for change. One example: manufacturers that make personal protective equipment (PPE) needed to adapt from selling gloves and goggles to a select few businesses or distributors, to promoting products to a vastly expanded market when the pandemic arrived.

Andrew Walker is the CEO of Shift7 Digital, a digital agency that specializes in helping manufacturers navigate digital transformation. Andrew has a front-row seat as digital marketing changes the manufacturing sector. He joins us to talk about it in this episode of B2B Nation.

Inbound marketing is one of the most popular revenue-generating strategies for B2B firms. When done well, inbound marketing turns your website visitors into prospects, and hopefully into customers.

If you want to reap the rewards of inbound marketing, you need to be knowledgeable about the tactics that help drive people to your site, including SEO, social media and email marketing. Once you start attracting visitors, you need to keep them and convert them with your skills around quality content, forms, lead nurture cadences and tools that help you identify, measure and communicate with your prospects.

Mastering inbound marketing requires most every tool in your marketing toolbox.

In this episode of B2B Nation, we dive into inbound marketing with Andrea Moxham, founder of Horseshoe & Co. Andrea is an inbound marketing expert who specializes in helping clients use HubSpot to grow their revenue and turn their site visitors into customers.

Among the topics we cover in this episode are content, forms, the gating of assets, social media, website experience, chatbots and more.

What makes managing people so difficult? It’s probably that we’re all different. But in the business world, we ask our leaders to manage teams of people: each with their own needs, wants, styles and personalities. It’s a big ask, and the larger the team, the larger the challenge.

Whether you’re an experienced manager of people or early in your leadership career,  leading your team became a lot more challenging in 2020. Individual styles and personalities carried over into remote work and affected how people dealt with their own health, as well as the health and safety of their families and friends.

In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to James Sherer. In addition to working on his PhD in business administration, James is an executive with the retail arm of Marathon Petroleum, which most people know as the Speedway brand. He’s also involved in a pair of entrepreneurial ventures: Salesology, which aims to help align marketing and sales, and Eventology, which applies a project management framework to event management and production.

One thing that was clear from our conversation is that there is good news for marketers managing people. Many of the skills you use in your marketing can help you effectively manage your team. Talking to people and promoting ideas is messaging and content creation. Managing people, like marketing, isn’t one size fits all. And that empathy you had to develop talking to your customers in 2020? It can come in handy as you lead your team through an unpredictable 2021.

Media buying is almost as old as marketing itself and it’s undergone similar changes to the larger marketing landscape in recent years.

There is, of course, the infusion of data into media buying. We collect it and analyze it in hopes that it will help us find our very niche audiences, which often consist of a very specific person who is part of a group of people deciding whether to make an investment.

Other changes impacting media buying include media consumption itself, which has changed significantly in the past 10 to 20 years. Or has it? Because newsletters and podcasts -- neither of which is new -- are the current darlings of online media. And there’s the year 2020, which was defined by changes that may or may not stick now that we’re in a new year.

We recorded this episode of B2B Nation at DemandFest, a half-day virtual event hosted by TechnologyAdvice. To discuss the state of media buying, we’re joined by Jason Gladu, president of Avani Media, a B2B media buying and demand gen agency, and by TechnologyAdvice CEO Rob Bellenfant, who takes some questions for Jason from the audience during the event.

It’s hard to grow your business without marketing. Businesses that have good products and services are great. And businesses with good products and services and a strong marketing strategy are even better. But marketing isn’t the only way to grow your business.

Your business -- and even your marketing organization itself -- have hidden growth potential. If you take a look at your people, your processes, and your organizational structure, you might find it. If you’re spending most of your time planning email blasts and designing landing pages, then you might miss it.

Can you do things more efficiently? Are you using out-dated processes that don’t meet your needs or goals? Is your organization full of ad-hoc processes that haven’t kept up with your tech stack? These are among the questions to ask as you look to become more efficient and more aligned.

Joining us for this episode is Karen Kimsey-Sward, who has spent her career helping B2B leaders grow their businesses by better managing their people, their processes, and their profits.

Among the topics covered in this episode:

When a lot of marketers think about search engine optimization (SEO), they think about keywords, and maybe header tags, and backlinks. But SEO is evolving so it can keep up with developments at Google.

To talk SEO today means talking about intent, clusters, reputation, and expertise.

Harry Sanders leads an award-winning SEO agency in Australia, started an online learning resource for people who want to learn more about SEO, and has even done contractual work for Google, all by the age of 23.

Harry and his agency, StudioHawk, are the developers of the DIRTy SEO approach to search engine optimization, which focuses on Delivery, Infrastructure, Reputation and Trust as the foundational elements of a modern SEO strategy.

Among the topics we cover in this episode:

Learn more about Harry’s agency at studiohawk.com.au.

There are more roles in marketing, open to more skillsets, and more areas of interest than ever before.

The advent of marketing technology (martech), the rise of marketing operations (marketing ops), and the infusion of data and analytics into all things marketing are creating opportunities for people with talents who might not have found a home in marketing a decade ago.

Where will your career in marketing take you next?

In this episode of B2B Nation, we’re joined by Kate Carnevale of IBM, who shares her career journey, from journalism school, to political communications, to a marketing agency, to a small healthcare company, to managing global campaigns for one of the world’s most-recognized brands.

Among the topics we discuss:

-- How does the marketing itself change when you go to work for a global enterprise?

-- Can you still find opportunities to be entrepreneurial or “scrappy” in a large organization?

If your small business lacks the expertise to understand, master, monitor, and optimize campaigns across these tactics, you might turn to someone like John Mann. John is a consultant who specializes in helping small businesses and entrepreneurs find and execute online marketing strategies that grow their business.

In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to John about how he helps small business owners make sense of all the online marketing options available to them, the misconceptions his clients often have about digital marketing, his favorite tools, and what the future holds.

You can learn more about John Mann here: www.nashvilleseoconsultants.com/

It takes a lot of time and energy to build a valuable brand. Your brand is more than a logo or a tagline. A good brand creates emotions and feelings, and it helps you define the moments and create the connections that lead to satisfied customers.

Think about everything that goes into your brand: Your products and services, your company culture, your voice and your messages. And then look at how quickly all of that was disrupted in a few weeks in 2020. Suddenly your brand was dealing with a global pandemic and issues of racial injustice. You probably didn’t see that coming.

Today, social media is the place where brands go to engage with customers, develop connections, and start conversations. Social media is also the place where B2B marketers can establish their own brand and share the knowledge they’ve accumulated in the field.

In this episode of B2B Nation, we talk to Chantelle Marcelle, a marketing consultant with more than a decade of experience in marketing, branding, public relations, and communications, about what it takes to build your personal and corporate brand on social media. You can learn more from Chantelle at http://www.chantellemarcelle.com/.