At the beginning of 2018, marketing leaders at business-to-business (B2B) firms face more pressure than ever to deliver new and innovative strategies. DataStax CMO Karl Van den Bergh believes “marketing is the most rapidly evolving corporate function.” We researched and boiled it down to the top B2B marketing trends to keep an eye on this year.

While goals may vary, the most effective campaigns this year will likely require new approaches. While some trends are more hype than substance, the following B2B marketing tactics are research-backed and ranked among the most effective methods. 

If you fail to generate new leads, you won’t have any potential customers in your pipeline. If you don’t have potential customers, your revenue is eventually going to dry up. If this happens, your business is going to be in real trouble. To help you get your year off to a great start, we put together a few quick, cost-effective B2B lead generation strategies that you can put into action this week.

Having an effective method in place to generate new leads is critical; however, it is also challenging – especially in the realm of B2B marketing.

The holidays have arrived and 2017 is coming to a close. As a business owner, this is often one of the few times of the year that you are able to take a step back and review your business. What many entrepreneurs and business owners forget, however, is that you need to look back in order to move forward and grow your successes. We’ve put together this basic 2018 Marketing Strategy Planning Guide to help you navigate your company’s marketing efforts and plan for an exceptional 2018. Free marketing strategy planning worksheet.

Starting a business can feel like a daunting endeavor, but there is no better time than now to start an apparel business and 2018 should be the year for you to finally take the leap.

The tools available to get started have lowered the barrier to entry, but the fundamentals of starting a successful company have largely remained the same. Like building a house, it is important to start with a strong foundation, before you worry about the extra finishes like the flooring color or the ceiling fans. Without the solid foundations in place for your apparel business, the house will collapse, so spend time building your business the right way. Here is a checklist to help you start or grow your apparel empire:

In a city like San Francisco, according to local Austin job board Indeed, the average Chief Marketing Officer earns approximately $173,000 per year in salary. This can obviously jump significantly, while in a place like Texas, it can float around the average of $120,000. Each location has outliers that stretch into the hundreds of thousands, but the fact of the matter is, an experienced CMO comes at a price that many startups or small businesses do not have the luxury to afford. This is where a Fractional CMO can step in and help drive a marketing team from an executive-level, and help a junior marketing team execute in a way that a company may not otherwise have the means to afford. A Fractional CMO can do this by sharing their time and expertise between several companies in a way that technology, communication, and project management platforms previously did not allow for.