Nick Nelson

Boosting and Deepening Engagement through Empathy in B2B Marketing

Nick Nelson on Jul 30th, 2020
B2B Marketing

Empathy is more than a buzzword. It’s not a box to be checked, or an added finishing touch for content. If B2B marketers want to successfully engage human audiences and break free from the deluge of irrelevant messages swirling around today’s customers, empathy needs to be at the center of all strategic initiatives from start to finish.

What Does Empathy Mean in B2B Marketing?

Empathy is defined simply as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. But I’m not sure that characterization fully does it justice in the context of modern marketing.

I rather like the way Zen Media CEO Shama Hyder described empathy in the better creative teamwork guide we helped our clients at monday.com put together:

Boosting and Deepening Engagement through Empathy in B2B Marketing

Should B2B Brands Join the Facebook Advertising Boycott?

Nick Nelson on Jul 14th, 2020
B2B Marketing, Facebook

Facebook has always presented an interesting conundrum for B2B marketers. It’s not a business-centric platform, necessarily. But with so many active users (nearly 2.5 billion at last check), keeping Facebook out of a brand’s social mix has been tough to justify.

Recent developments are making this decision more complicated than ever.

Facebook and Trust: A Rocky Relationship from the Start

When the world’s largest social network first came into existence in a Harvard dorm room, nearly two decades ago, it was known as “The Facebook.” An instant-message conversation between founder Mark Zuckerberg and an unnamed associate around that time later came to light, and … it isn’t pretty (via Business Insider):

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask.

Should B2B Brands Join the Facebook Advertising Boycott?

Why Content Marketing is More Important Than Ever for B2B Brands

Nick Nelson on Jun 30th, 2020
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

In his recently published eBook, Corona Marketing, Joe Pulizzi recounts how he and his wife launched the website Content Marketing Institute in 2007 at the exact time as a devastating financial crisis was beginning to unfold in the United States.

“At the time, we believed things couldn’t have been bleaker,” Pulizzi writes. “Looking back though, this was absolutely the best time for my wife and I to start a business.”

Why is that? Because their commitment to providing useful, helpful and relevant content – even at a time where it was difficult to drive direct revenue with that content – paid major dividends as the market recovered.

Why Content Marketing is More Important Than Ever for B2B Brands

Manufacturing Runs: 9 Summer Content Marketing Tips Drawn from the Diamond

Nick Nelson on Jun 23rd, 2020
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

Baseball and content marketing are two of my greatest passions. When I think about it, there are some intrinsic similarities between the two that aren’t hard to see.

Much like content marketing, baseball is rhythmic and methodical by design. Sure, there are the flashy home runs (and it helps when your favorite team *ahem* set the all-time record a year ago), but at its core, baseball is about strategy, patience, and sequencing: Accept the inevitability of failure and learn from it. Take good at-bats, call the right plays, string together base runners, manufacture runs.

via GIPHY

Sadly there is no baseball season right now, but if there was, it’d be inching toward “the dog days of summer” – a term given to those stretches in July and August where the relentless heat and daily grind start to wear on ball players as they battle their way through a marathon 162-game schedule.

Manufacturing Runs: 9 Summer Content Marketing Tips Drawn from the Diamond

Break Free B2B Marketing: Sean Crowley of Dun & Bradstreet on Cracking the Alignment Code

Nick Nelson on Jun 16th, 2020
B2B Marketing

“Integrated marketing” is an ideal with clear appeal, but one that is often difficult to actualize in practice. Developing a truly integrated strategy — in which marketing functions in lockstep with sales, product, and other departments — is immensely challenging, especially within large and complex organizations.

It’s not necessarily for a lack of trying, or a lack of good intentions from all involved. These roles simply operate and think differently from one another. Friction and disconnects are inherent. Silos are pervasive.

As the Leader of Integrated Marketing for Sales and Marketing Solutions at Dun & Bradstreet, Sean Crowley tackles these barriers head-on each day. Eager to hear his philosophies on bridging these crucial gaps, and to learn what’s working at D&B, TopRank Marketing’s Joshua Nite joined Sean for a chat during B2B Marketing Exchange in February.

Break Free B2B Marketing: Sean Crowley of Dun & Bradstreet on Cracking the Alignment Code

Break Free B2B Marketing: “Webinerd” Mark Bornstein of ON24 on Dialing In Digital Experiences

Nick Nelson on May 26th, 2020
B2B Marketing

Like many other digital experiences, the webinar has traditionally been viewed as a means to an end: Create something that seems valuable to your audience, and use it as a vehicle to acquire contact information for lead generation purposes.

But marketers like Mark Bornstein take a different angle: What if we view the webinar itself as an end — an extremely valuable marketing tool on its own? What if we’re just muddying it up with all these mandatory form-fills and sales-y follow-ups?

“You need the name once, you need the demographic information one time,” he observes. “But why do we keep putting forms together again and again? What matters is the experience.”

Break Free B2B Marketing: “Webinerd” Mark Bornstein of ON24 on Dialing In Digital Experiences

How to Hit a Marketing Home Run with Experiential Content

Nick Nelson on May 7th, 2020
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

While their importance pales in comparison to many other things taken away by our society’s ongoing lockdown, I do find myself missing sports. Going without them during a difficult time causes me to appreciate the comfortable routine and reliable distraction they provide all the more.

Those who know me will not be surprised to learn that I’m longing for baseball especially — everything from strikeouts and singles to slides and steals. But there is no part of the game I miss more than home runs.

Home runs are among the most satisfying individual achievements in sports. When a batter goes deep, he takes care of everything, going from home plate to home plate and putting a run — or more — on the board single-handedly. It is the literal representation of “covering all your bases.”

How to Hit a Marketing Home Run with Experiential Content

Break Free B2B Marketing: Oracle’s Kelvin Gee on Winning with Enterprise ABM

Nick Nelson on Apr 28th, 2020
B2B Marketing, Video Interviews

Everyone in B2B is talking about account-based marketing. And almost everyone is practicing it in some form — around 93% of organizations, according to SiriusDecisions.

“Not many are killing it though,” says Kelvin Gee. “That’s the problem. They start pilots … then they re-launch and learn from the mistakes. That’s just a natural maturation.”

This is a fundamental process in digital marketing, of course: test, assess, optimize. But in the Break Free B2B series, our goal is to help you fast-forward it by learning from the mistakes, successes, and revelations of your innovating peers in the field. And as the Senior Director of Modern Marketing Business Transformation at Oracle*, Kelvin draws from a deep well of experience at one of the powerhouse brands in enterprise technology.

Break Free B2B Marketing: Oracle’s Kelvin Gee on Winning with Enterprise ABM

Break Free B2B Marketing: Gary Gerber on Scaling ABM without Losing Focus

Nick Nelson on Apr 14th, 2020
B2B Marketing, Video Interviews

When people think of account-based marketing (ABM), they tend to think of it as a smaller-scale practice. Since ABM is fundamentally built around focus in the aligned pursuit of high-value accounts, it’s often associated with a significant reduction in target market scope (i.e., “Let’s narrow down to our 20-30 most promising accounts).

This itself is a constraint from which B2B marketers need to break free, which is why Gary Gerber stood out as a fitting guest for the first interview in our second season of Break Free B2B. At B2B Marketing Exchange in February, he sat with TopRank Marketing President Susan Misukanis to unpack what’s needed to bring ABM to the next level.

Gary and his team at Folloze helped Cisco develop a sophisticated and highly effective ABM program that targeted 20,000 customers through one-on-one, personalized content and messaging.

Break Free B2B Marketing: Gary Gerber on Scaling ABM without Losing Focus

6 Tips to Keep B2B Marketing Teams in Rhythm While Working Remotely

Nick Nelson on Mar 31st, 2020
B2B Marketing

In these unconventional times, many work teams are grappling with an unconventional dynamic: fully distributed personnel and remote collaboration. This setup presents a number of challenges, but thankfully we live in a time where technology makes it easier than ever to stay connected and tightly aligned on our work.

For B2B agencies like TopRank Marketing, this has always been a point of emphasis. In servicing clients from around the globe, we’re accustomed to communicating across distances, borders, and time zones. We occasionally have our own team members work from home, and in fact, we have a few who do so full-time.

While having everyone in the organization work remotely is uncharted territory for us, our built-in comfort with digital collaboration gives us a head-start, and has allowed us to hit the ground running with minimal disruption to our programs and workflows.

6 Tips to Keep B2B Marketing Teams in Rhythm While Working Remotely