As marketers, we want to learn all we can about our prospects and customers – who they are and what motivates them – so we can develop solutions and marketing approaches that will really engage them. We hold focus groups, develop buyer personas, conduct surveys, and track anecdotal reports from sales … all to find out what the hot buttons are, what prospects feel most strongly about, and to discover the best ways to persuade them.

Some updates to Google’s algorithm have a bigger impact than others. With the rollout of BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) in 2019, Google’s algorithms went from simply understanding words to being able to understand the context that the words were in. For example, think about how the meaning of the word “bank” differs in these sentences: I am going to the bank. / I am standing on the bank of the river. Thanks to the BERT algorithm, Google recognizes these nuances, and is able to provide search results that more closely align with the subject being searched for, providing the searcher with information that is more relevant.

According to the experts at Marketo, marketers can expect to see a significant shift in marketing priorities over the next couple of years. The marketing automation company surveyed over 700 marketing execs and CEOs for their views on how marketing KPIs, required skillsets and technology tools will change by the year 2025. The surveyed marketers ranked customer retention, lead generation and customer lifetime value as their top three KPIs today (in that order). By 2025, they forecast that the order will switch, with customer lifetime value taking the lead at spot number one, followed by customer retention at number two (and lead generation will drop down to spot number six.)

Launching a new medical device is a complicated process. First, of course, you have to come up with a concept. What do you want your technology to do, and how will it do it? There’s that initial period of blue-sky thinking and prototype development, where you refine your technology and determine whether it’s viable. Then, once you decide to move ahead with commercialization, and you’ve achieved your safety and efficacy goals, the pace picks up, and suddenly you’re on a fast track to your launch target date.

Remember “audioblogging”? The first audioblogs, or podcasts, were introduced more than 20 years ago. In the decades since, podcasting has evolved from these clunky first recordings into a billion-dollar industry. In the past five years, it’s ramped up even faster, with podcast listenership doubling worldwide since 2016.

If you’ve chosen HubSpot as your marketing and CRM platform, congratulations! You’re on your way to maximizing and measuring your marketing activities and spend like never before. To get the most out of your investment, though, it’s important to launch it correctly. That’s why the onboarding process for HubSpot is so critical.

In-person meetings are an integral part of the face-to-face sales process in many B2B environments, but they’re not really possible in these lockdown times. As a result, sales and marketing professionals have had to find ways to gain the attention of their prospects and customers from a distance. At Living Stone, we’ve put our focus on digital go2market strategies to help our clients stay close to their customers and target audiences.

Even before COVID, webinars were a key tool for marketers. And for good reason: according to a study conducted by GoToWebinar, 73% of B2B marketers and sales leaders believe that webinars are one of the best options available to generate high-quality leads.i Now, due to the pandemic, the use of webinars has skyrocketed, with organizations using them for everything from new product launches to professional education. At the same time, people are realizing that webinars offer a lot of benefits – mostly relating to time and cost savings – that will continue to resonate, even after the coronavirus abates.

We know that peer recommendations are vitally important in B2B. Customer testimonials, use cases and references are a key part of the sales process. But there are lots of ways to expand on the power of peer recommendations, and boost trust and relationships, with user-generated content for B2B.