Our digital marketing consultants provide their advice on what they consider the four most important marketing topics.
A lot of B2B companies still ignore social media, because they think only B2C belongs there. Which gives you the opportunity to be a pioneer and shine bright. B2B has a smaller, but the more specific audience and decisions are influenced greatly by word of mouth and reputation. So it is important to turn your customers into brand ambassadors and get them to share on social. Here is how you get social:
And if you are already on social, we have one piece of advice:
We’ve said it before, and we are going to say it again: you are only as boring as you think you are. We even think ECM can be fun and social. Every company can be fun and interesting and social media gives you an opportunity to prove that. Each business has an appealing side that can relate to a broader audience and allow them to create an idea, which will resonate on social. Do you know what’s really boring? Showing only your product and not the people behind it or how it makes the world a better place is a major miss. Humanize your brand and you will find your way to people’s hearts. Here are some ideas on how you can improve your online social personality:
Speaking of content, remember there can’t be a successful social media campaign without content marketing…
The majority of marketers that do content marketing feel unsatisfied with its effectiveness. The better you are with content marketing, the more successful your social will be. Find the type of content that works for your business; make it original and valuable; share it on social. Yes, success is this easy.
A good content marketing strategy is an essential part of your overall success. Your audience needs educational content, so give it to them in various formats: blogs, images, videos, infographic. Try a variety of content forms to test what works best and focus on the social media channel that best accommodates them: YouTube for video demonstrations and recorded webinars; live Twitter chats; carefully curated Scoop. It bulletins. Even if your potential customers are not the most active social media users, you will be out there whenever they need you.
If you are doing your content marketing right, you are generating a lot of organic leads. Unless you are using marketing automation, chances are you are letting them go. If you want to focus your efforts and nurture your leads and turn them into paying customers, you better pick a marketing automation system. Another telling sign that you need marketing automation is if your sales team is overwhelmed by the number of quality leads. Marketing automation will help you assign faster and easier the leads between marketing and sales. But most importantly, you will be able to track and examine the digital DNA of the visitors.
When it comes to marketing automation, businesses are looking to: improve lead nurturing, improve lead quality and increase lead generation. The benefits of the technology are better prospects and lead insight, and an increase in efficiency since it saves time for manual tasks. The lead scoring is also enhanced, as well as the nurturing and the distribution. Marketing automation does not mean that you won’t have to do any marketing mind you. It will just help you scale your efforts. So once you create relevant, optimized content, you can implement your inbound marketing. It’s worth considering centring your marketing messages around a buyer’s persona as if it were a real person.
For the past few years, we’ve been hearing how important mobile is and how crucial it is for business. Does the word “Mobilegeddon” ring a bell? As more and more people are using smartphones and cross-device marketing is part of every successful marketing strategy, mobile was supposed to grow. Consumers continue to be more comfortable with phones and use them for search and decision-making. Yes, even for B2B.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a lot going on in the mobile department of B2B marketing. It seems that the only place where mobile plays a role is on Social since most of the people that browse B2B social media profiles do it from mobile devices. The study also found that desktops play a more influential role in the customer journey: bigger purchases are usually made from desktops as opposed to mobile devices. Once a mobile connection turns into a desktop one, the size of the deal also increases. Smaller companies are more likely to engage on mobile.
Don’t give up on mobile just yet: it seems to be 75% more influential in open opportunities compared to closed customers.