by gabriel_sales | Mar 10, 2014
In late February, LinkedIn began rolling out a new publishing platform. While its impact in the world of content marketing remains to be seen, here is what you need to know:
What
“LinkedIn is opening up our publishing platform to our members, giving them a powerful new way to build their professional brand. When a member publishes a post on LinkedIn, their original content becomes part of their professional profile, is shared with their trusted network and has the ability to reach the largest group of professionals ever assembled. Now members have the ability to follow other members that are not in their network and build their own group of followers. Members can continue to share their expertise by posting photos, images, videos and their original presentations on SlideShare.” ~ LinkedIn
Why
“One of our big, strategic bets for the company is for LinkedIn to become the definitive, professional publishing platform,” says Ryan Roslansky, Head of Content Products at LinkedIn. “We do this because we want LinkedIn to be the place where members can become productive, successful professionals – not just when you’re trying to find a job, or search for another person.”
In other words, LinkedIn needs a hook that would make it more of a daily or at least a weekly destination for end users, rather than a place you go to update your resume when looking for work.” ~TechCrunch
How
Once you have been given permission to publish on LinkedIn, the process for publishing is extremely simple. Here are the directions from LinkedIn:
- In the Share an update box on your LinkedIn homepage, click the Edit icon. This takes you to the writing tool.
- Write your post. To include visuals:
- Click the camera icon in the tools panel on the right.
- Click Browse in the box that appears.
- Select the file you’d like to upload and click Submit.
- Click Publish, Save, or Preview in the lower right.
- Click Close in the lower left to leave the writing tool
You can find many more answers to publishing questions here and a list of best practices here.
For more on using LinkedIn for B2B, read Using LinkedIn for B2B Marketing. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Mar 7, 2014
On the plains of Africa in the early days of humanity, there was no such thing as big data. We didn’t have numbers and statistics to help us determine what to do and what not to do. So, how did we learn, store and retain information about the world around us?
We used stories.
It was a story, rather than a statistic, that let us know that ‘this plant is poisonous’ and ‘that tiger will kill you’. While the world around us has changed dramatically since the time of tribal storytellers, humans still love to listen to and tell each other stories to inform, entertain and persuade.
Advertisers learned a long time ago that stories could be used as a tactic to influence buying behavior. In today’s digital marketplace where buyers are constantly bombarded with statistics and pushy sales messages, storytelling is one strategy that can help you stand out and close business.
Here are three easy ways to incorporate some basic storytelling into your content marketing strategy:
1. Plot structure
Most of us remember from elementary school that stories generally follow this structure: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and denouement. Many of today’s great advertisements, including this year’s most popular Super Bowl Ad, also follow the classic storytelling structure.
By using this structure as the basis for your marketing content like blogs, white papers, webcasts, videos, testimonials, etc., your readers will be much more engaged with your brand. Telling a consistent story across different media channels also helps to create the trust required for closing in complex solution sales.
2. Characters
The fact that you likely know who ‘Flo’ is and what ‘the Allstate guy’ sounds like are evidence of the effectiveness of using characters in your sales and marketing messages. While it might not make sense for your business to feature a fictional character in your content marketing, you can still use voice and tone to humanize your content and give it some personality.
Another way to install characters in your marketing content is by telling your customers’ story in a creative way like Sprint did recently in a series of commercials. If you are able to tell a story where your customer is the hero, this can persuade prospects in the midst of a buying decision that they too could be a hero by making a purchase.
3. The ‘hook’
We all know the feeling of finishing a chapter in a novel or an episode in a television series—we are immensely invested in the story, then something dramatic happens and we are left with a cliffhanger. By intentionally not leaving everything on the table, you can use stories to create desire to know what happens next.
In B2B sales, creating an exciting and motivating hook is a bit more difficult, but it can be done. In a blog or video series, use the plot structure above and build some action with a few characters. Then, leave your readers hanging right before the climax and tell them when and where they can come back to find out what happens next.
For more on leveraging storytelling in your marketing content, read B2B Customers & Brands: Why Emotional Connection Matters. Feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Feb 21, 2014
Marketers obviously have good intentions with their content marketing strategy, but what they produce often ends up missing the mark.
For example, you may only care about the business benefits of a solution, but the content you are sent is a high level technical overview. Or, you are just trying to quickly learn the basics about something, and the only content offered is a 20-page white paper.
Experiences like this can be frustrating for the B2B buyer. To them, it seems that there is a disconnect between their needs and your solution. In this day and age, if buyers can’t find the answers they want with relative ease, they are moving on to your competitor.
To solve this problem, here are three steps to creating highly engaging B2B content that converts:
1. Build buyer persona/personas for each type of buyer you sell to.
The first step is taking the time to truly understand your buyer. In B2B sales, this often means understanding the multiple types of buyers that are now involved in the sales process. Each of these buyers may have different needs and concerns, and you need to understand these concerns completely before creating any content. For example, while the CEO may care most about P&L, the HR rep and the IT manager have entirely different concerns.
2. Map out your sales cycle into stages, and create content to match.
With your buyer personas in mind, the next step is mapping out your buying cycle. To keep things simple, break it up into three stages: education, verification and closing. Then, create content for each stage for each of your buyer personas. Ask yourself, if I were an IT manager and knew nothing about X product/service, what would I need to see to feel educated on the basics? Ask yourself the same for the CEO, the marketer or whoever else is involved in the buying process. Then move on to the verification stage, and ask yourself what each type of buyer persona would need to see to verify that you are the best choice among the many alternatives. Again, remember that verification for an executive may look entirely different than verification for someone in marketing. Finally, do the same for closing stage.
3. Use marketing automation to push content at appropriate times.
With your personas and content created, you can use your marketing automation platform to gauge what type of persona each prospect has and where he or she is in their particular buying cycle. By offering each prospect content that speaks to his or her most pressing needs at the appropriate time, your prospects will find your content genuine and valuable and will be much more likely to convert.
By following these steps, your prospects will feel like you understand them, which is the first stage in establishing trust. To learn more about creating quality B2B content, read “5 Reasons Your Content Isn’t Converting”. Please feel free to contact us with any questions.
by gabriel_sales | Feb 19, 2014
This is the second half of a blog series on B2B content ideas for ongoing or consistent content production. For Part 1, click here.
4. Conference attendance
For any type of professional event you are hosting or attending, you should create content. This could be simple blog posts or even emails letting your readers know the who, what, when, where and why of what you are attending/hosting. If you want your readers to engage with you in some way at the event (e.g. meet with you at a conference), make sure you publish/send the content far enough in advance for people to make plans.
5. Common objections
In B2B sales, you often hear the same objections over and over again during your sales process (e.g. “We don’t do SaaS products” or, “I don’t want to outsource X”). Building content around these common objections allows you to have collateral when you run into these objections on phone calls. Just imagine the conversation: the objection is raised, and your sales rep is able to say, “I totally appreciate you raising that issue. It is a fair concern that we hear all the time and to address it, could I send you this quick blog we’ve published on the topic?”.
6. New client mentions
If you have your client’s permission, you can write blogs or send updates in newsletters each time you bring on a new client successfully. A lot of online business news publications will publish these types of updates if submitted in the form of a press release, especially if the client is particularly well known or the solution is novel in some way. Along the same lines, you can also publish content when your clients achieve some type of success that you have been instrumental in creating (e.g. winning an award, surviving an IT disaster, passing an audit with flying colors, etc.).
7. Comparison matrix
For more complex sales like SaaS platforms or management consulting services, creating a comparison matrix can be very helpful. By comparing features, levels or protection, levels of maturity, pricing, etc., you can help you prospects in their decision making process while highlighting the value of your solution. For example, if your software solution has four or five features that your major competitors do not, a matrix is a great way to quickly prove that difference in a visual format.
Creating content is always going to require some work, but sometimes coming up with an idea is more than half the battle. Hopefully these ideas help you get started!
For more tips on publishing marketing content in 2014, read:
3 Things to Add to Your Blogs in 2014
Feel free to contact us with any questions or visit our services page to learn more about our B2B content development services.
by gabriel_sales | Feb 17, 2014
Every marketing survey and report seems to be touting the same advice: create more, quality content.
For most businesses engaged in content marketing, coming up with a few blog ideas and an initial white paper is pretty easy. Consistently coming up with ideas two years later is a bit more difficult.
We’ve put together a list of seven ideas for generating quality B2B content on a consistent basis:
1. News sources
Creating content that references something happening in the news is now a fairly common practice. The news your content references must be relevant to your business or solution in some way. You can set up alerts on Google with specific keywords or key phrases, so you will be notified immediately when something pertaining your business occurs. This type of content does not have to be complex or very detailed; just restate the ‘news’ portion and add a few paragraphs of commentary giving your take on the issue.
2. Legal/regulatory compliance updates
For companies selling products and services that have legal or compliance related issues, giving your readers updates can be highly valuable. The Dodd Frank Bill and the Affordable Care Act are two recent examples of regulatory changes that are having a huge impact on their respective industries. By giving expert commentary and advice on how to handle these types of changes, you can highlight your status as an industry thought leader while giving readers something they will find truly valuable.
3. Features updates
Another good idea for ongoing content production is features or services updates. This is pretty common sense, but every time you update your product, service, delivery method, training process or anything else that adds value to the business, write a blog or make a video about it. Make sure that if you use the content in marketing campaigns, send it to your current customers (as well as your current prospects) for a potential upsell opportunity.
To continue reading the second half of this blog series, click here.
by gabriel_sales | Feb 13, 2014
Over the past few years, we have created a lot of different types of videos for our clients. We are finding that one of the most valuable types of videos to use in the B2B sales process is a ‘headshot’ video of an executive.
These are effective for several reasons. First, they allow prospects to start to get to know the people behind the company. B2B sales is (and has always been) about relationship building and headshot videos help to start this process in a digital format. Second, humans are hardwired to pay attention to faces; apparently, the Fusiform Facial area of the brain causes this. In the midst of thousands of marketing messages coming at your prospects each day, anything that can encourage them to pay more attention is good.
If you have never created a headshot video before, here are 5 basic tips to help you get started:
- Dress professionally. What this means may differ from company to company (i.e. an enterprise software company vs. a hip, new tech startup), but looking the part is always a good place to start. Make sure your clothes, hair, makeup, etc. are in line with your company’s image.
- Address sound quality. For people new to video production, sound can be a hard thing to get right. Start by making sure there is no background noise in the space you are recording. To create a tone of professionalism, make sure your executive has a relatively high-quality microphone.
- Check your lighting. If you do not have a professional video studio with lighting, your best bet is to shoot in a room with a lot of natural light. Whatever you do, stay away from harsh lighting and directional lighting for headshots.
- Add a text bar. For headshot videos, you want it to be immediately clear who is speaking. Always put the name and title of the featured executive in a text bar at the beginning and end of the video.
- Don’t shoot with your iPhone. This goes without saying, but you need to produce high quality videos if you want them to be effective as a sales tool. Your best bet is to shoot in HD. If this is not affordable, try to go for a 16:9 aspect ratio and a resolution of at least 640×360.
If you would like to see an example of an executive headshot video, you can watch this testimonial video from one of our clients. For more on the value of video in B2B sales, read 3 Reasons You Should Leverage B2B Video in 2014.
In late February, LinkedIn began rolling out a new publishing platform. While its impact in the world of content marketing remains to be seen, here is what you need to know:
