by gabriel_sales | Apr 18, 2014
This is the second half of a blog series featuring tips for creating more effective B2B content marketing. You can find part one here.
2. Create a publishing calendar.
As we’ve written about previously, B2B marketers today are increasingly expected to act like publishers. It is no longer enough to publish content once a year or once a quarter; you need a consistent stream of valuable content to remain relevant to your customers and prospects. In order to keep track of and organize the publication of all of this content over time, it is a very good idea to create a publishing calendar.
Without a calendar to execute to, it is easy for a great strategy to fall apart halfway through. Conversely, if everyone on the marketing team has clearly defined tasks with deadlines attached, there are no excuses for not getting things done. Try to create publishing calendars or schedules a few months in advance, or quarterly. Scheduling out any further than that may prevent you from staying agile and optimizing for improvement. To ensure the process goes smoothly, it is a good idea to have daily or weekly meetings to assess progress and address any issues that prevent work from being completed on time.
3. Put production and approval processes in place.
Every time a piece of marketing content is developed, there are a number of steps the content has to go through from creation to publication. Many times, content needs to go through various stages of editing before it is approved—grammatical, formatting/HTML, etc. In terms of both efficiency and quality assurance, companies should document these processes for content production and approval.
When production and approval processes are in place, there is no ambiguity about what needs to get done before a piece of content is completed and ready for use. One thing to remember is to factor in the time it takes to complete the production and approval processes when creating your publishing calendar. For example, if an email vendor requires email creative two days before an email blast is sent, that needs to be documented in your production process and reflected in the deadlines of your calendar.
For more tips on creating more effective B2B marketing content, read 7 B2B Content Ideas that Help Move the Deal Forward.
Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Apr 16, 2014
The world of content marketing and how it should impact your b2b strategy
MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute recently put out a report on B2B Content Marketing 2014 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends. The report looked at B2B companies overall marketing effectiveness and found that 42% of B2B marketers say they are effective at content marketing.
When you take a deeper dive into the report, it seems there are identifiable factors that contribute to the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of companies’ content marketing programs. The report shows that whether you have someone overseeing strategy, the number of tactics used, the number of social media tactics used and the amount of budget allocated all may impact a companies’ content marketing effectiveness.
However, it seems the factor most closely tied to whether or not a B2B company feels effective at content marketing is the existence of a ready-to-implement strategy. Taking this into consideration, here are three tips for more effective B2B content marketing:
- Create a content strategy.
If you have no strategy behind the content you produce, it is like trying to do archery in the dark; and blindly shooting arrows without a clear target is never going to be effective. In order for your marketing content to get people to take the actions you want (e.g. fill out a form, send an email, make a purchase, etc.), you need to think about who the audience is and how they will be able to use it. For every piece of content you create, there should be a clear intention and goal behind it, whether that goal is brand awareness or lead gen.
Part of creating a B2B content marketing strategy involves mapping out the stages of your sales cycle and developing content each stage. This entails early-stage, educational content (e.g. blogs, videos) to help with discovery as well as late-stage content that verifies the value prop (e.g. case studies, use cases)—and everything in between. By setting up your content marketing strategy like this beforehand, your prospects can find content that is relevant and valuable regardless of where they are in their buying process.
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by gabriel_sales | Apr 14, 2014
The 2014 B2B Content Marketing Report done by the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs found that 93% of B2B companies currently engage in content marketing.
These companies have realized that today, buyers begin to interact with B2B companies digitally before engaging with sales directly. They know that in order for buyers to interact with their company digitally, they need to have digital content for buyers to interact with.
While it is great that so many companies are engaged in creating content, many B2B companies are failing to understand the true function and goal of marketing content in relation to the overall sales process.
Many companies are treating their content—blogs, white papers, webcasts, nurturing emails, etc.—like an extension of their sales pitch. They see every blog post as another chance to push their product or sell their service. They see every email as the perfect place to try to close the deal. The main issue with marketing content like this is that the focus is on the company, not the customer. The emphasis is put on the company’s goal (selling) rather than the customer’s goal (solving a problem).
There is always going to be a time and place to sell. However, many of the prospects that interact with your marketing content are nowhere near ready to buy. In fact, only about 5% of B2B prospects are ready to buy at any given time. The other 95% are at various stages of their buying cycle—discovery, education, verification, etc.
This means that if all of your marketing content is simply an ongoing sales pitch, only 5% of your audience is going to be receptive to it at any given time. The other 95% still want to be educated or compare their options, and your sales pitch is going to seem pushy or annoying.
While talking about your product or service is okay, try to keep the hard sales messaging on your product and service related pages only. In your marketing content like blogs, white papers and webcasts, your focus should be providing valuable information that your prospect can use in some way. By providing value prior to purchase, you help to build trust with your prospect, which is a prerequisite for most–if not all–B2B deals.
To make sure your marketing content is focused on helping the buyer solve problems (rather than selling the buyer a product/service), you should first work to clearly understand what those problems are. Then, create content that answers any and all questions your typical buyer may have in trying to solve those problems.
A simple rule for determining whether your content is company/selling-oriented or customer-oriented is to ask, “What does this piece of content do for the prospect?”
If your only answer is, “It convinces them that my product is the best” or, “It explains why they should buy my service,” you probably should go back to the drawing board. ”If your answer is something like, “It gives them information on the pros and cons of SaaS solutions” or, “It explains the five most important aspects of energy efficiency,” you are probably on the right track.
To learn more about creating compelling and engaging B2B marketing content, read The New Rules for B2B Customer Engagement. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Apr 10, 2014
During the course of our sales process, we often hear from early stage prospects who have not really thought about outsourcing to help outperform the competition in terms of lead generation. Many of these early stage prospects haven’t committed to outsourced B2B lead generation and often struggle to understand or grasp the enormity of change that can occur as a result.
What many companies fail to realize is that simply by freeing up the time that was once spent educating and qualifying, you are now able to provide a deeper level of service to your customers, which in turn can lead to higher retention, more upsell possibilities and more referrals.
By shifting focus to serving the needs of your prospects, you change the dynamics of the entire conversation. The prospect realizes you are there to help, rather than to just sell.
By leveraging outsourced B2B lead generation, you have a team of experts at your side to help with all of the heavy lifting. While your competitors struggle to figure out how to get more leads or implement a marketing automation platform, you are freed to focus on strategy, content, and closing that can help you outperform the competition.
The other major benefit to B2B sales outsourcing has to do with time. Sales and marketing have changed dramatically in recent years with the rise of digital technology, and adapting your sales process to this new digital environment is a task that is neither simple nor quick.
As B2B sales and marketing outsourcers, we have over 13 years of experience building scalable sales machines, and we have developed a proven and streamlined process for running integrated sales and marketing campaigns for our clients. We have found that using this process, we can achieve in 90 days what typically takes 9-18 months for a client to implement on their own. For startup companies looking to take a new product to market, this difference can be significant when attempting to outperform the competition.
To learn more about the value of leveraging outsourced B2B lead generation to outperform the competition, read How an Outsourced Sales Team Can Help Your Marketing Team. You can learn more about the B2B outsourcing services we offer on our service page.
Please feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Apr 7, 2014
As technology advances, marketing tactics need to adapt to how people are getting and sharing information.
For many years, marketing has generally been split into two categories, Business to Consumer (B2C) and Business to Business (B2B). While these were effective ways to look at marketing in a business sense, these definitions can hide the fact that in either case, you are marketing to people. As Bryan Kramer wrote for Social Media Today, we should be focused on Human to Human (H2H) sales and marketing.
What does this mean for your marketing tactics? It is time to start connecting with your potential clients in a different way. Rather than ‘selling hard’ or feature/benefit messaging, H2H simplifies our language and puts an emphasis on empathy and personalization while connecting with people socially.
Here are four ways you can make your marketing more H2H:
1. Speaking Human
More and more, people use social platforms to communicate, get information and share what they learned. This means your messages should be simplified and easy to share. It is acceptable to write in a conversational tone and avoid big words.
2. Social Sensory Marketing
In order to grab and hold the attention of prospects, you need to appeal to and connect with the basic human sensory system. The best way to do this is to incorporate imagery and video into your day to day marketing. You may get a few views on your text only post, add a picture and your numbers will likely increase. Add a cartoon or a video and you’ll up your chances of getting shared.
3. Customer Relationships
People want to connect with you and your brand. It is important to start that connection early. One way to let your potential clients get to know you is through video. When a potential client can see who they’ll be working with, it starts to build trust, which will speed up the sales process significantly. To learn more about creating headshot videos, read 5 Basic Tips for Executive Headshot Videos.
4. Become a Better Storyteller
This is your chance to appeal to people’s emotions. Tell stories about the pains your current clients were experiencing and how you were able to help them. Use pathos to connect with your potential clients and let them know you understand and can lend a helping hand. Read 3 Ways to Incorporate Storytelling into Your Marketing Content for more on how to be a better storyteller in your marketing content.
H2H marketing makes you look at what people want in everyday life and how they want to feel. So what is it that people want? They want to be a part of something bigger; they want to feel, to be included and to understand. We are no longer just selling a product or service we are connecting with people.
To learn more about how to appeal to your customers, read What Do B2B Customers Want from your Branding and Marketing Content?
Feel free to contact us.
This is the second half of a blog series featuring tips for creating more effective B2B content marketing. You can find part one here.
