What if I told you, the key to success in marketing these days is a series of letters? No, it isn’t ROI, CMS or SOS (for days when a deadline is looming). These days, the key to successful marketing is B.A.N.T.

B.A.N.T. is a lead qualification criteria that stands for:

Budget

Authority

Need

Timing

You may be asking why B.A.N.T is important to you as a B2B marketer. The answer is that B.A.N.T. should be considered whenever you’re creating a project, communications piece or concept. B.A.N.T. helps determine the audiences you should cater your communications to, what ROI will come from your campaigns and it helps sales and marketing departments integrate more seamlessly. It’s more important than ever to justify marketing budgets with clear ROI, and sales and marketing alignment is a vital part of this.

Here are some important questions to ask yourself to ensure you’re keeping B.A.N.T in mind:

Budget: Will this marketing effort help us determine if the audience has the budget to invest/purchase/engage in what we’re selling?

Authority: Is this marketing communications piece going to the correct person? Can they make a direct decision regarding what we’re selling or are they an influencer?

Need: Does this marketing effort help us determine if our audience has a need for our solution? How quickly does this need have to be filled?

Timing: Can we determine if this audience is ready to purchase/invest in what we’re selling? Can we create urgency to act?

If you answered YES to at least three of the above questions, you’re on your way to creating a near-perfect marketing communications piece that will lead to sales opportunities. Congratulations!

To find out what B.A.N.T. marketing means for marketing and sales team alignment, check back for part 2 of this blog.

As a designer working in B2B marketing, I’m always looking for new and unique tools that can take my projects to the next level. Below are five Wordpress Plugins that I found that can help enhance blogs.

1. HeadSpace2 SEO: Wordpress SEO made simple. With this amazing all-in-one meta-data manager, you can fine-tune the SEO potential of your blog, including configuration of meta-data for posts, pages, categories, setting tags/keywords, descriptions and page titles.

2. WPtouch iPhone Theme: Customize many aspects of your blog’s appearance and turn it into a stylish smartphone Web site that visitors can view on their iPhone, Android, Opera Mini, Palm Pre or Blackberry.

3. Thank Me Later: Automatically e-mail anyone who comments on your blog. Or, you can set   it  up to send a message to all first-time visitors welcoming them and reminding them to sign up for the RSS feed. It also lets you send messages after a pre-defined amount of time, making them appear more unique.

4. Wordpress Related Posts: Generate related posts and add them to the feed. Once a visitor reads your post, they can read other suggested posts and keep clicking through your blog.

5. Polldaddy: Create polls that can easily be embedded into your posts, pages or sidebar via the widgets panel. There’s also a cool reports section in your WP control panel that displays results.

Have you used any of these Plugins? Do you use other Plugins to add features to your blog?

People in B2B organizations are all too familiar with overused buzzwords (not to be confused with portmanteaus), jargon and marketing speak that prolong conference calls, fill up PPT slides and echo throughout the cubicle walls of businesses throughout the world. And with the rise of social media comes a tidal wave of new buzzwords for everyone to learn.

Using and understanding buzzwords seem to be a right of passage in business. Your buzzword vocabulary grows along with your years of experience. And, if you want to appear truly sophisticated, you can even make up new ones!

It’s disheartening when I see people attempt to prove expertise by buzzword intimidation. Shouldn’t we seek to collaborate, rather than alienate potential colleagues, prospects and customers? The best B2B marketers seek to distill down concepts to be as simple and straight-forward as possible when helping their clients implement programs that engage audiences and convert customers. The steps are simple:

1. Define what you sell

2. Determine how it is different

3. Explain why people should care

4. Understand the best way to communicate that information

To be fair, a lot of hard work surrounds these steps, but it gets even harder when you have to trudge knee-deep through the buzzword jungle.

Do you think it’s time to declare a National Day Without Buzzwords? What marketing buzzwords to you think are overused?

As many B2B Fishbowl readers probably already know, I’m a big advocate of content marketing. Providing customers and prospects compelling, actionable, unbiased content that will help them do their jobs better is a surefire way to build credibility for your brand, position yourself as a thought leader and generate leads.

I think hosting webinars are an excellent way to use content marketing to accomplish your goals. Here’s why:

1. Webinars are engaging: Rather than offering a static article to audiences that they have to read through on their own, webinars allow you to walk them through a concept or presentation while entertaining them.
2. They’re interactive: Webinars allow you to request input and answer questions from your audience in real time, so you can provide them with customized information right on the spot.
3. You can show and tell: If you need to demo a software application or other step-by-step process, webinars let you do so in a straightforward way.
4. Your content can live on: Best of all, if your registrants miss the live webinar, you can archive the content for future viewing. This also allows prospects to share your webinar with others in their organization.

I recently hosted a series of webinars for Loop Demand Gen, which can be viewed at this link. Please take a look at these and let me know what you think in the comments section.

Are you taking advantage of webinars to educate your target audiences, or for training purposes? Why do you think webinars are ideal for B2B marketers?