Is every minute on the ground in High Point during the October International Home Furnishings Market scheduled as tight as your jeans the day after Thanksgiving? Contacts to meet in real life, collections to preview, contracts to sign, and after-hours parties to let off steam make it tough to squeeze in anything more. 

If you can find time to sneak away to learn the latest in industry trends and technology, there are definitely some highlights we want to point out. Consider it an investment in staying relevant and making your colleagues think you are smarter than them.

"Do more with less." It's not just a polite request—it's expected from everyone, all the time. Consequently, we all have a slash-this and slash-that in our job titles. Which means that no matter your background, if you’re in marketing, you’ll be asked to assign, comment on, and approve creative work at some point. 

When presenting creative to our client partners, we often hear the following questions from them: What am I looking at? What should I react to? What kind of feedback are you looking for?

If those questions sound familiar, follow our five rules to get the best creative work from your partners and team—without spending a ton of time on back-and-forth emails or rounds of revisions. (Fortunately, a degree in graphic design, fine art, or creative writing is not required.)

A huge piece of the inbound marketing puzzle is the buyer persona. Inbound is all about delivering the right type of content to the right people at the right time—but according to the  Information Technology Services Marketing Association (ITSMA), only 44% of B2B marketers use buyer personas.

We no longer have to rely on sending one message to one giant group of people and hoping our target audience sees it. We now have the power to personalize the content we create and decide when, where, and who to show it to.

Gaining insights about consumers when it comes to B2B marketing can prove to be quite difficult—but the effort will pay off more and more as you begin to fully understand your buyers.