Ardath Albee, B2B Marketing Strategist and CEO of Marketing Interactions, joins the Business of Story Podcast to discuss the importance of knowing your customers in a godlike way and the shift brands need to make to become relevant to their audiences.

The Business of Story is sponsored by ACT!, Sigstr, and Zignal Labs.

ACT! helps individuals, small businesses, and sales teams organize prospect and customer details in just one place, ultimately driving sales. Visit http://actstory.com and enter to win a pair of BOSE noise-cancelling headphones.
A company of just 100 employees sends 1,000,000 emails per year on average. What if you had a million new opportunities to engage your key customers and prospects? Sigstr opens up the marketing potential of employee emails. Learn 3 creative ways to unlock the power of email signatures: http://bit.ly/1P0bE9A
Zignal Labs is a real-time cross-media story tracking platform to make your life easier to see relevant data and reach your customers where they are. Stay ahead of what the world thinks with a free trial at http://zignallabs.com/story

In This Episode

Why your personas are critical to the complex B2B sell
How the “pronoun shift” will have a profound impact on the relevance of your content
What the Greek legend of Narcissus has to do with your brand
Why it’s important to turn one-off campaigns into serial business stories for true customer engagements
Tips to start creating your own buyer and customer personas
Ardath’s Relevance Maturity Matrix and how to make the shift to being relevant in the marketplace

Resources

Ardath's Twitter, @ardath421
Ardath’s books, “Digital Relevance” and “eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale”
Marketing Interactions
Content to Conversion Conference, Feb 15–17
Robert McKee

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The past, present and future of the internal communication profession feat. Bill Quirke