What’s Next in B2B Marketing?

Next month, 750 business-to-business marketers will gather in Boston to learn and bond at the MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum in Boston, the theme of which is “Marketing for What Comes Next.”

Side note from the Good Problem to Have Files: The B2B Forum is now sold out, but you can still attend On Demand. More on that below.

(Second side note: I just realized with some measure of freak-out that the event “next month” is actually next week. Now practicing deep-breathing relaxation techniques…. It’s all good. We’ve got this. Breathe.)

So what is next for B2B marketing, anyway? How can we prepare ourselves and our organizations? What kind of skills do I need? How can I best equip my team?

And when we get there… will there be snacks?

Thirty-one of the B2B Marketing Forum speakers sat down with our friend and fellow speaker Lee Odden to share predictions ranging from realistic to ridiculous, on where they think marketing is heading.

The contributors are Joel Book, Michael Brenner, Heidi Cohen, Frank Days, Gini Dietrich, Susan Emerick, Laura Fitton, Steve Garfield, Kerry O’Shea Gorgone, Jim Greenway, Tim Hayden, AJ Huisman, Doug Kessler, Larry Kim, Seth Lieberman, Jennifer Sable Lopez, Amanda Maksymiw, Brian Massey, Loren McDonald, Jason Miller, Jon Miller, Lee Odden, Christopher Penn, Jeannine Rossignol, Shane Snow, Justin Steinman, Cindy Valladares, Viveka von Rosen, Tom Webster, Andy Zimmerman, and me.

You can flip through the e-book and see all of their entries below.

My own prediction was aspirational—based on the goal of my new book Everybody Writes, and based on my own hopes and dreams for B2B marketing in general.

I wrote it as a press release issued sometime in the near-ish future.

Lee trimmed my entry to fit the e-book page. (My Boston Globe editors were always trimming my copy, too; it’s why I never could cut it as a daily news reporter.)

So here is my post in its entirety. The full e-book follows.

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TL;DR Retired After a Long Run
 By Ima Lovinit
 Special to the NY Times

The Internet announced today that its shorthand phrase TL;DR ("Too Long; Didn't Read") will be replaced with a new phrase: GR;LI (“Great Read; Loved It”).

Smart businesses around the world celebrated the move as a victory for a cause they’ve tirelessly championed and invested in: quality content that’s ridiculously useful and valuable – no matter the length.

Pundits credited B2B marketers for leading the new charge, and marketing departments throughout the world celebrated by looting jargon and buzzwords from their content and burning them in public bonfires. Particularly flammable were words and phrases such as “cutting-edge,” “value-added,” “impactful,” and “best-of-breed.”

“I don’t understand what happened,” said a stunned Jonah Peretti, founder and CEO of Buzzfeed. “One minute the sole alternative to long, boring content was all cat pictures and listicles and useless quizzes about which Jaden Smith tweet best represents your soul… and then POOF, it’s gone.”

Related: 21 GIFs of Buzzfeed Editors Drinking Themselves Senseless Today

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Here’s the e-book:

The MarketingProfs B2B Forum is sold out. But you can still attend.

B2B Forum On Demand, the all-online version, will deliver 28 hours of recorded event sessions to you, no matter where you are, starting October 17.

These recordings will be available to you any time, anywhere you have an Internet connection, until January 31, 2015. To register for B2B On Demand, go here.
And for the record: YES. There will be snacks.