Lately I’ve been speaking with local B2B companies about trends in online marketing: gen Y and their influence on authenticity in marketing. Growing skepticism of and disenchantment with “old media” like newspapers, radio and TV. 
The rise of new media like blogs and online social communities. And particularly the trend away from “push” marketing activities and towards inbound marketing, or what I have always called Attraction Marketing: putting out a clear message that will resonate with the clients you intentionally draw towards you.
The pushback I’ve always gotten is “That may work with B2C, but are Fortune 500 decision-makers really sitting around surfing the ‘Net and reading blogs?” This is said as if it’s about as good a use of time as watching funny cat videos on YouTube.
So, I feel pretty vindicated by Shannon Sweetser’s post at Hubspot today, quoting an email from an anonymous Fortune 500 CEO, especially this part:
As a customer, I find this type of approach to sales [poor outbound marketing, like endless follow-ups and unrequested newsletter subscriptions] to be largely annoying to me and unproductive for you.
We learn far more about what we want to purchase by searching the web, looking for customer references in blogs and forums, word of mouth, and by finding white papers on your site that concretely describe solutions to problems we are having.
There you have it. I don’t know what else you need to know. Stop sending LinkedIn invitations. Get that white paper finished and posted on your web site.
Photo by Adam T4
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is this 500?
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2009/ceos/
Hi Yohaa, Yes, that’s the list of Fortune 500 CEOs I was referring to. Thank you for posting the link and for visiting.