Educational Initiative B2Beacon Launches to Assist B2B Digital Marketers

ClickZ, in collaboration with business-to-business (B2B) agency BusinessOnline and 30 leaders in digital marketing, have launched B2Beacon – a collection of insights, data, tools and a new approach to help digital marketers in the B2B sector, improve their performance.

B2Beacon aims to provide free, unbiased educational resources including: a new approach called “The Company Buying Journey”; how-to guides to help users implement this approach at their company, and insights and case studies from the front lines. All resources are based on current research and real-world experience.

“We recognized a major gap in the B2B education market”, says Mike Grehan, publisher, at ClickZ. “We knew we could and needed to do better, so we assembled a group of advisors to create resources to meet the unique needs of B2B marketers.”

B2Beacon’s “Company Buying Journey” is a new approach for B2B digital marketing that is centered on the prospect or customer as they move through a continuous, looping buying journey. It is named “Company” Buying Journey because B2B marketers typically sell to a company of people, not to one individual.

“The majority of our new business comes from current customers,” says Mike Kawasaki, global marketing program director at Agilent Technologies. “B2Beacon’s approach is a much better fit for B2B than the old funnel model.”

Additional topics found in B2Beacon’s “how-to” guides include: get data right; know your customers; develop strategic plan; get your house in order; develop the right content; and optimize programs.

As mentioned above, B2Beacon has been developed by a select group of analysts, associations and industry leaders representing every key aspect of B2B digital marketing. Experts making contributions are from organizations including Adobe, Bizo, BMA, BusinessOnline, ClickZ, Conductor, Content Marketing Institute, DemandBase, ExactTarget, Forrester Research, Google, Kenshoo, LinkedIn, Marketo and Salesforce.com. And an Advisory Council that includes Jeffrey Hayzlett, Jim Sterne, Joe Pulizzi, Rand Fishkin, Jon Miller, Russ Glass, Chris Golec and Liz Miller.

“B2Beacon is a rallying cry for B2B marketers to band together and elevate B2B marketing,” says Thad Kahlow, chief executive of BusinessOnline. “Help us refine and shape this resource… be the beacon for your peers, join the movement!”