We’ve already talked about this one—the people love getting things for free. Creating helpful tools and releasing them for free is a fantastic way to help your customers solve their problems and build up brand affinity. (Image: Content Marketing … A B2B marketing strategy dictates how an organization will be proactive in attracting customers, closing sales and remaining on the road to continued financial success. The Top 12 Most Effective B2B Marketing... Pros and Cons of Running Multiple Businesses, How to Grow a SaaS Company Past $10m ARR – Experience from Intuit & When I Work, How to Grow a SaaS Company From $1m-$10m ARR – Experience From Mailshake & When I Work, How to Grow a SaaS Company From $100k-$1m ARR – Experience from Mailshake & Right Inbox, 14 of My Favorite Companies Doing Content Marketing Right. In 1986, Chouinard committed either 1% of sales or 10% of profits (whichever was larger) to environmental activism, and 10 years later the company started to exclusively use organic cotton. Intercom also allows their trial users to attend product-specific webinars. It’s all about diverse and consumable content aimed at your targeted buyer, … There’s an obvious reason for the longevity of word-of-mouth marketing – it works. “This marketing stunt worked across many fronts: we built Salesforce.com morale, got great press coverage, and brought our competitor’s customers to our event to hear our message. With Google Ads, your customers are actively looking for something that you offer. It’s a training session, product demo and Q&A all rolled into one live and interactive meeting. Is intentionally open-ended and not necessarily based on numbers. HubSpot fills their pipeline with well-populated leads. In short, content marketing should be about creating high-value pieces that make a direct contribution to your sales efforts. After all, some customers will need a nudge to refer you, even if the service you delivered was world-class. HubSpot hosts Inbound, a conference dedicated to marketing, sales, and business. You’ll have set your high-level business goals and connected them to marketing activities and metrics that carry you toward them. Our walkthrough on how B2B marketers can identify key content marketing metrics and objectives outlines how to approach this from a content marketing lens, but the same thinking can be extrapolated to other marketing strategies. Content marketing will likely surge in 2021 as B2B companies have big concepts to relay surrounding the state of their marketplace. Chances are your B2B marketing strategy that’s in the works as you read this post is connected to increasing revenue in some fashion. Simply put, it helps businesses to close deals. Achievable: It needs to be realistically possible (i.e. First of all—what does this *actually* mean? Live chat is often incorrectly pigeonholed as a way of dealing … Done right, all three can be especially effective when it comes to growing your business, because they take advantage of external platforms – whether a website, event, or social account – that already have a bought-in audience. Brands are already using it for a range of reasons, from customer acquisition to raising brand awareness. Companies with aligned sales and marketing teams: Live chat is often incorrectly pigeonholed as a way of dealing with complaints. In order for someone to win, someone has to lose. ), Relies on questions that can be answered with data, numbers and/or statistics. That may have something to do with the fact that only about 46% of marketers have a documented strategy. Employee activation goes far beyond that. But taking the time to create a documented strategy could mean the difference between effective content marketing and ineffective content marketing. Very few companies have gone completely under from a single bad marketing decision. Listed below are some of the best content marketing strategies and ideas that can be used to market your products to businesses: 1. Storytelling Simplifies Your Message. It’s a tactic that Slack also utilized recently, when it put an open letter to Microsoft as a full-page ad in the New York Times the day the software giant’s competitor, Microsoft Teams, was unveiled. And if you don’t have any, talk to the customers of your competition. At Foundation, we start every content marketing strategy with a B2B customer journey map. The goal is simple: use content marketing to drive more … I can categorically tell you that it’s not just about building a happier office. The humble webinar has long been a staple of B2B marketing. The impact on your business goal here is likely going to be a lot higher, so it’s a metric you’ll want to pay closer attention to. In that letter, Slack spoke about the lessons it had learned in building its platform, noting that communication software has to be more than a list of features. Too often, marketers take a “write it and they will come” mentality to content creation. And the more helpful your tool becomes, the more people will be talking about it. What you have at this point is data—not insights. Let’s hear ‘em. There’s something that many marketers agree is incredibly important, and yet many companies don’t do it anywhere near as much as they should: If you don’t know what your customers’ pain points *actually* are beyond just a wild guess, your marketing decisions aren’t going to be based on research and your chances of flopping are much higher. However, companies are starting to recognize that webinars are more than just great tools for interacting with and helping to educate current customers—they can also be used to increase customer lifetime value, reduce churn, convert trial users and, yes, even generate leads. Every organization is chasing success. At this point, you’ll have conducted plenty of research—customer research, industry research, analytics research—to pull out as many valuable insights as you can. Looking at the funnel, we can see that at the top of the funnel, blog posts, SEO, videos, podcasts, and social media are the most effective methods for doing exactly that. And in this post, we’re going to talk about why exactly that is, how you can navigate the process, and share some real-world examples from brands you know (and maybe love). The best marketers don’t just know more about the latest channel, tool or tactic. To gain the best possible understanding of the market and your customers, you’ll need both. In other words, if you want your message to reach more people, your employees hold the key. According to study.com (great domain name), employee empowerment means giving employees a certain level of autonomy and responsibility for decision-making regarding their specific organizational tasks. The Sherlock Homeboy technique will become your best friend here. For example, Stripe offers guides and resources on everything from talent recruitment to using machine learning for fraud detection. First, let’s use a simple example to compare B2B to B2C from a marketing standpoint: For B2B companies, the potential buyer pool is typically smaller and less urgently looking to buy. Conversational Selling and Live Chat. In other words, if your approach to marketing is “sit back and hope our customers break down the door to throw money at us” — you’re probably going to be waiting for a while. Use the Sherlock Homeboy Technique to see what’s working best for your competition. However, when it comes to B2B marketing, many B2B … Intercom in particular frequently hosts webinars that feature a well-known guest or business leader sharing their expertise. Contently, the content marketing platform. With that in mind, here’s my rundown of the 12 most important B2B marketing tactics for 2020, and all the reasons you can’t afford to ignore them. At this point, you’ll have your customer research, a customer journey map, qualitative & quantitative analysis, and a breakdown of your key metrics and SMART goals. There’s a ton of value in offering downloadable assets on your website, especially when they speak to problems beyond your product or service. The big takeaway that we’ll repeat here is this: Actually talk to your customers. That’s why it’s vital for marketers to keep a finger on the pulse of current and future trends. Creating a B2B content marketing strategy is not rocket science, but it does require intentional effort and dedicated time and resources to get it completed. But word-of-mouth marketing isn’t just about doing your job and hoping happy customers will refer you. In their classic book The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, Al Reis and Jack Trout write about The Law of the Opposite: “If you want to establish a firm foothold on the second rung of the ladder, study the firm above you. I’ve never met someone with such creative tactics and deep domain knowledge not just in one channel, but in every flavor of marketing. Ahead of a major campaign launch, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff hired actors to pose as protesters at a conference for Siebel. Here’s the high level view of the 4-step persona process, but the full post is worth a read if you’re still at the persona-building stage. Strategy steps that you’re getting hung up on? Indeed, just 39% of sellers say they believe thought leadership can assist with their lead generation efforts. If you’ve made it this far, you’re not like most marketers…. Copy the section and send it to your boss or team and say “we need to think about how we can apply this.”, And with that, we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments down below. Dave Gerhardt (Former VP of marketing at Drift) had been running some engagement experiments using LinkedIn video, which was a fairly recent addition to the platform, and found his videos getting thousands of views and a ton of engagement. What you need to figure out now is how you’re going to increase the amount of case study downloads this year. It’s a strategy where employees share company content to their personal social networks and in turn are able to grow their personal brands. Just because you can track and measure 100 different metrics doesn’t mean you should be tracking and measuring all 100. Importantly, there are no shortcuts here. Specifically, long-form content delivers much better results than short-form content. “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. On average, a company’s employees have ten times more connections than the company itself. And it’s even better when giving away these free assets that help your audience also result in leads for your business. Last fall, CEO Rose Marcario donated $10 million (Patagonia’s tax cuts) to environmental charities to protest a tax bill. So are lawyers that write custom privacy, refund and TOS policies. Instead, you’ve got to create a formal program that actively encourages employees to get involved. If you stand for nothing, you will find nobody against you, and nobody for you.”. Create 1 short-form video for social media each week, Be a guest on at least 1 podcast per month, Conduct at least 1 link building outreach campaign per week promoting our new blog posts to improve our rankings in Google, Include multiple call-to-actions in blog posts to relevant case studies, Launch a retargeting campaign on Facebook/LinkedIn to promote our case studies to blog post visitors and video viewers, Ask current customers for testimonials & include them on your case study landing pages, Figure out what your audience is searching for the most, Setup a landing page that offers a downloadable resource related to their question. Other businesse… Later, our End of Software campaign was recognized by PR Week as the ‘Hi-Tech Campaign of the Year.’” —Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce. The same way Yelp / TripAdvisor is make or break for restaurants — Capterra / G2 are becoming that for B2B software. One of the most significant trends in the B2B world over the past several years has been the Yelpification of B2B. Why you need a strategy. Just 8% would be encouraged to engage with a brand that addressed them by their first name, and only 7% would be likely to engage with a birthday email. It is for businesses that sell services or products to other organizations or businesses, unlike consumers, usually use B2B marketing strategy … What’s more, they’re likely to spend 60% more on their purchases. That’s a waste of time, effort and money. Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis istpoe natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque eopsloi. It doesn’t take from the fact that B2B brands can thrive and succeed with content marketing just as much as B2C brands if they develop an effective B2B content marketing strategy. #2 for 70+ branded terms.#3 for 60+ branded terms.#4 for 80+ branded terms. “generate 50,000 inbound leads this year” when you only had 200 last year is likely a major stretch). It’s happened, but it typically happens after the cumulation of several bad decisions, and you want to give yourself every advantage to avoid those pitfalls. They probably don’t know you, and they’re probably going to be hesitant to give you their information or swipe their credit card right away—if they even stop scrolling and give you the time of day.