Author Archives: Erin Estep
About the Author
Erin Estep is Service Director, Strategic Communications Management, at SiriusDecisions. She has more than 10 years of experience in brand strategy, including positioning, identity, public relations, digital strategy, copywriting and account management. Follow Erin on Twitter @eeestep.
Top Three Reasons to Use Marketing Automation for Influencer Relations
- 26th March 2013
Here are the top three reasons to use marketing automation for influencer relations.
Continue Reading....The Three A’s of Content
- 22nd February 2013
We get a lot of questions about content – from organizational structure and workflow process all the way down to “Which should we do – a white paper or a webinar?” That’s because you can’t market without content, which makes the whole idea of “content marketing” as something new a little absurd, but I get it – we need more content than ever before, and that content needs to be better. Many organizations are in the process of mapping existing content assets to the buyer’s journey and developing strategies for filling gaps, but how do we ensure that the new content we’re creating is of high quality? Low-quality content often lacks one of the following “Three A’s” of content.
Continue Reading....What We Talk About When We Talk About Content
- 18th December 2012
Raymond Carver's 1981 book of short stories What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is a series of vignettes focusing on characters seeking to define and understand the true nature of love through conversation. The deeper the characters delve into attempts to articulate love, the more inarticulate they seem to become. The same seems to be happening for those of us in b-to-b marketing seeking to define (never mind solve!) the content conundrum. The deeper we get into the conversation, the more broad and complex the problem reveals itself to be. Often, we find clients trying to solve the “content problem” before coming to a shared understanding of the nature and scope of the problem in the organization.
Continue Reading....Buyers Don’t Want Your Content
- 13th November 2012
Something struck me the other night as I was creating some new content for an upcoming event I’m facilitating. So, I’m building content, and actually thinking about content itself as a topic area we have been thinking and talking about a lot lately as a research team. And here’s what struck me: Buyers don’t want content. Buyers want information.
Continue Reading....Content Marketing and the New B-to-B
- 16th October 2012
Content is to marketing as matter is to physics. How on earth can content marketing be a new concept? The truth of the matter (pun intended) is that it isn’t. Corporate and marketing communications functions have long engaged the market with high-value, high-interest content, unfettered by overt ties to the product price list or lead-generating registration forms. What has changed is the nature of b-to-b marketing and its escalating requirements for product and demand content, which has given rise to the “trend” of content marketing.
Continue Reading....Social Strategy: What’s Your Policy?
- 17th September 2012
We’ve gotten many questions lately about what types of documents are required to support a social strategy. What I typically see, at first, is a single, lengthy social strategy document that tries to cover as much ground as possible. Over the course of our work and review process, this is broken down into the following three types of working documents, each with a clear intention, target audience and unique set of inputs and components.
Continue Reading....You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby
- 6th September 2012
Marketing, over the past 10 years, has undergone a women’s-lib-esque transformation – shifting from a focus on brand and production value to demand creation and lead generation. The tools and technologies that support the modern marketer are less about design and more about measurement. We operate less on gut instinct and more on predictive outcomes. We’ve come a long way, baby…. There is a dangerous non sequitur in this evolution: the implication that a tactic’s measurability is directly proportional to its value and impact. This type of thinking not only puts almost all reputation-oriented spend at risk, it also reinforces old habits that many organizations are hoping to change, such as the shift from traditional marketing to a more inbound-oriented approach. Philosophically and intuitively, most marketers understand the value of inbound in terms of efficiency and effectiveness but remain stuck in their old patterns of behavior because traditional marketing is easier to measure.
Continue Reading....Social Strategists: Movin’ On Up
- 15th August 2012
What we’ve seen over the past five years of social evolution has been nothing short of radical. It’s the relatively quick shift from the perception of Twitter as a silly, frivolous task for interns to muck around with, to the realization that social media can and should be integral to the way we operate as marketing professionals. What I’m beginning to see now is even more interesting – and extreme: the emergence of more and more social strategists, with a wide variety of titles, outside of marketing (and sometimes even in senior-level management). For a role that just four years ago was largely filled by transient intern populations, this is a noteworthy shift.
Continue Reading....The Latest B-to-B Public Relations Trends
- 30th July 2012
In a homage to those deliciously fluffy “hot or not” glossy magazine lists, perfect for summer reading, here’s SiriusDecisions’ summer 2012 trend alert for b-to-b PR.
Continue Reading....Influencers Are People, Too
- 26th July 2012
The key to success in influencing and enabling influencers lies in a persona-based approach – beginning with a simple, role-based mapping of influencers and their habitats, areas of personal and professional interest, interaction preferences, and sphere of influence. This simple research and discovery initiative can help social media and communications teams begin to rationalize the influencer universe and develop more targeted and relevant indirect programs to activate and enable influencers in a way meaningful to the organization, influencers themselves, and ultimately, buyers.
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