Remember the old days in B2B Marcom, when companies hid behind stock photography and glamorous spokes models? Those days are long-dead.
I've been saying repeatedly, for years, that the best way to influence your target audience is with your authenticity. To do that, turn your company inside out. Let your formerly behind-the-scenes staff talk to your audiences.
I spoke about exactly this in a BtoB NetMarketing Breakfast in Manhattan in 2009. See the post-event video interview here. I appear at 1:48.
We, at The Indium Corporation, turn our company inside out in many ways, including tech paper authorship and presentations, technical session chairing, editorials, interviews, and blogging.
How do YOU turn your company inside out? I'd love to learn.
Really interested to encounter your blog - engaged "client-side" marketers are still few and far between, probably because they're trying to cope with a heavy workload and can't seem to find the time or energy to reach beyond it.
I couldn't agree more on your thoughts on authenticity. I've just co-authored a book called "The Death of Propaganda" (www.threevoicesstrategy.com) where we take issue with the chest-beating, shiny happy marketing of B2B companies ("state-of-the-art" "cutting-edge" "global leader" etc. etc.) and propose authenticity/credibility as the way forward. It's a message that has differentiated us strongly as an agency and opened the doors to top management, who often tell us that they have never really believed in traditional marketing anyway! With so many companies built upon product excellence, know-how and the efforts of the salesforce rather than on marketing programs, authenticity seems to work very well as a business strategy.
Kind regards,
Jonathan Winch
Best of luck with your book.