From Apple’s “1984″ Superbowl ad, directed by Ridley Scott, to the “Mac vs. PC” series of 66 commercials, the computer industry has always relied on advertising. Or did it?

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Sometimes sage advice arrives unexpectedly, from the least likely source at the least likely time. Lying in bed in my Philadelphia Flyers pajamas, reading myself to sleep with throwaway fiction was not where I expected to find a terrific insight into B2B brand messaging. When bolt-of-lightening insights strike at unlikely times you just have to hope you’re alert enough to see it.

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After 20 years in the B2B marketing business, I have developed an affinity for what works. I don’t worry about being fancy or trendy. I’m just looking for the stuff that makes sense and helps my team do a great job for our clients.

That’s why I love personas.

Personas are prototypical character sketches of your key prospects. At Schubert,  we use personas to gain a more detailed understanding of the target audiences we are trying to reach. By assigning detailed personalities and characteristics to these personas, we begin to better understand the key influencers in the B2B buying process. Armed with this insight, we are able to build the most effective messaging to compel them to take action and buy something from our clients. And fall in love with the brand.

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“You can’t bore people into buying products. You must interest them.” Marketing guru David Ogilvy is certainly onto something.

Modern-day content marketers are faced with endless opportunities to communicate and tell a brand’s story. Be it online, in print or through social media, B2Bs need to find the topics that interest their audience – and potential customers. The better they are at addressing these ideas, the more likely it is that key stakeholders will take notice and stay focused.

The most important step to any content marketing strategy is understanding who your brand speaks to and what they care about. Especially when there are multiple fields of interest at play, realizing what industry-specific topics matter the most will be the key to a brand’s most successful, and relevant, content platform.

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I can’t write any languages other than English (you can’t count my tourist Spanish and I didn’t retain anything from that one semester of Russian I took in college), but I’d bet that few other tongues get as beaten or abused as English.

As a writer and a former magazine editor I have a special place in my heart for the written word (a lover of words is a logophile, by the way). I’ve had to come to grips with the fact that the business world is not a place where I find many of my ilk. In fact, it seems like business (and most of the media) is hell-bent on destroying my love. I guess I should consider that job security. Nonetheless, it still pains me to see so much business-oriented information so poorly written. If I can stop even one person from inadvertently abusing the language (and making themselves look stupid in the process), I can die happy.

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You, as a communications professional, are tasked with giving the right voice at the right time to your brand using the right channels. But with so many outlets in today’s media landscape, the potential for a communication mishap is alive and well – especially in social media. Take the recent KitchenAid Twitter mishap during this year’s first presidential debate. Similarly, remember the StubHub incident involving tweeted profanity? Both of these scenarios demonstrate something that every social media marketer should realize – cracks in these strategies can leave a brand teetering on the edge and how you respond can make a difference in surviving a public snafu.

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Everyone loves Flo. She’s helpful, quirky and infectious. She presents a likeable human quality for Progressive, the insurance giant she represents. But Progressive’s famous branding recently took a major hit during a social media battle about its role in a fatal automobile crash. To learn more about the case, click here.

Responding in a spam-like manner on Twitter compromised Progressive’s sense of empathy. Progressive joined a bandwagon of brands that are struggling to identify themselves as human in the social media world.

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Let’s face it. Your B2B website faces tons of competition for your customers’ attention. You used to just have to educate prospective buyers, but now you also have to entertain them so they don’t get bored and click away before you get your key points across.

Text and professional quality photos are no longer enough. You need to “tell your story” fast and with as much impact as possible. If you don’t, your competition may get the business – not because their product or service is better, but because they explained it better…and faster.

As a creative agency, we help B2B companies tell their stories with videos, animations and interactive tools. I’d like to showcase some that have been very successful.  This entry is about edutaining on a website using animated videos.

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Charles Caleb Colton, an English writer in the early 1800s, said that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It is in Colton’s spirit that we use donuts to explain the many facets of B2B marketing communications.

Derived from Doug Ray’s “Social Media Explained” photo which he shared on Twitter earlier this year, we put together a B2B marketing version. We hope you find our explanations as entertaining (and insightful) as the original intended. Many thanks to Doug for the inspiration!

It’s a natural reaction for brands to walk on eggshells in hopes of avoiding a PR disaster. Should you jump right in or turn the other cheek? Admit the facts or deny the truth? Certain situations, however, cause a knee-jerk reaction to “act now, think later,” leaving a company without any plan for dealing with consequences.

Take Chick-fil-A for instance. The company recently stated its stance on gay marriage. It managed to simultaneously cause an uproar that put its brand right smack in the middle of a sensitive topic — without any action plan for wading through the battle, both publicly and on social media.

Sure, everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion. But, what if the situation wasn’t a result of a communication blunder, but rather a service or product problem, customer dissatisfaction, industry buzz or other scenario where a simple response just won’t cut it? No matter the reason behind a cry for help, following some tried and true advice can be one of the best decisions a brand can make for keeping its image and reputation intact.

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