Field notes from real accounts

Most digital marketing for B2B advice reads like a menu: search, SEO, social, email, run them together for full coverage. That advice is written for a sales cycle measured in days. If your buyers take three to nine months to sign anything, running four channels at once just produces four sets of numbers you can’t […]

A remarkable share of B2B buyer personas get written without a single piece of evidence. Someone in a workshop decides that “Marketing Mary” is 35 to 44, checks LinkedIn on her commute, and cares about “efficiency.” Nobody asked Mary. Nobody looked at what she actually typed into Google before she found the company, or what […]

The standard B2B customer journey deliverable is a diagram: awareness, consideration, decision, three boxes and two arrows. Everything on it is accurate enough, and none of it helps you decide anything. I’ve drawn that diagram for clients. It photographs well in a slide deck. It has never once told me where a deal actually got […]

A B2B user story is only as good as the behavior it’s built on. Most of the ones I see are built on a guess: someone on the marketing team imagines what a buyer wants, writes it up in the standard format, and ships it as research. It reads fine, and it’s still fiction wearing […]

Most B2B email marketing advice is about the wrong ten minutes of a lead’s life. It covers subject lines, send times, and open rates for the campaign that goes out after someone converts. It says almost nothing about the window right after they submit the form, which is the part that actually decides whether the […]

Almost everything written about B2B marketing channels is a taxonomy: nine channels, a paragraph of pros and cons on each, a closing line telling you to diversify. That answers a question nobody asked. The question a marketing budget actually has to answer is which channels produce customers for this specific business, and a list of […]

I don’t have a client video campaign to show you. I’ve run plenty of paid media for manufacturers and technical companies, and none of it has been video. So there’s no case study here. What I can stand behind without one is the measurement side of B2B video marketing, and specifically the gap between what […]

Most B2B growth marketing advice is a list of things to add: a new channel, a new automation sequence, an account-based marketing motion, a content calendar. Add enough of them and growth is supposed to follow. The highest-return work I’ve found doing this is almost never on that list. It’s finding a constraint inside a […]

Inbound marketing made one promise: publish something genuinely useful and buyers find you on their own, instead of you interrupting them with a cold call or a bought list. That promise is still correct. What’s changed is the page it was built on top of. Inbound assumed a search results page. You wrote the guide, […]

Most explanations of B2B vs B2C marketing start with the same list: B2B has longer sales cycles, more decision-makers, higher-value deals. B2C is faster, more emotional, driven by impulse. All of that is true, and none of it is the difference that should change how you run a marketing program. The difference that actually matters […]

“B2B marketing trends” posts share a scoring problem: they predict, and nobody ever comes back to check. Somebody writes “video will keep growing” and “AI will personalize everything,” a year passes, and neither sentence gets held to account. I’m not going to do that here. Instead, here’s a narrower question: what actually changed in the […]