Comprehensive thought leadership consulting for B2B & professional services firms
By Bob Buday, Bernie Thiel, Susan Buddenbaum and Tim Parker Leaders of professional services firms can increase the return on their marketing and sales investments by asking one question: Are marketing and business development on the same team? For most firms, our research and experience tells us the answer is “no.” Although marketing and business …
Getting Marketing and Business Development on the Same Page Read More »
In desperate times, a firm will placate customers who are unreasonable or even nasty, just to hold onto their business. This is Dante’s ninth circle of hell. Good marketing generates many leads. It also gets a firm recognized by companies that don’t need help at the moment but will in the future, what marketers call …
Discretion and Dignity: What Great Marketing Gives the Marketer Read More »
Thought leadership can be seen as an evolutionary timeline with five phases. Here’s how to move up the scale so you can generate revenue through thought leadership. B2B companies vary tremendously in the ability to gain recognition for their expertise. Many firms with deeper and more differentiated expertise are not nearly as well known as certain …
Part 1: Moving Your Firm up the Thought Leadership Evolutionary Chart Read More »
Social media greatly raises the bar for everyone on the quality of their ideas. The multitude of market discussion on social media and thought leadership seems to center on how effectively blogs, Twitter, social networking sites and other online tools can propel ideas into the mainstream. Hard to argue against it, especially when a professional …
Social Media: The Good and the Bad for Thought Leadership Marketing Read More »
What do you do when the phone isn’t ringing or email box pinging with inquiries? We know many professional firms whose lead streams remain soft. Â And they are worried (as they should be) because they realize thought leadership marketing is not a lead-generating spigot that can be turned on or off. Â Developing a compelling, …
Here’s how to generate substantially more leads than typical white paper campaigns deliver — by shifting from “biased” to “unbiased” distribution channels such as endorsements and recommendations of influential parties. In an earlier article, we explained how to improve the content of a white paper, the most important ingredient in generating leads. We discussed why a white …