Aside from generating more sales, there are two other compelling reasons to introduce a referral program: We all know how effective content marketing can be. Focus on Personalized Content. Organic search click-through rates are continuing to decline, while organic impressions on Facebook and LinkedIn have dropped by as much as 90% in recent years. Right now. Almost half of marketers are using automation to bolster their personalization efforts, second only to customer journey mapping and A/B testing. I wanted to draw attention to this particular aspect of content marketing. The Sherlock Homeboy technique will become your best friend here. You can find plenty of crafty ways to get your message in front of prospects, but if you want those people to actually pay attention—rather than just ignoring you—you better do your research. But good email marketing is about much more than sending a few messages and waiting for the leads and sales to come pouring in. Demonstrating their commitment to their developers and customers, Twilio also hires developer evangelists who can teach others about coding and the world of software development to serve as the public face of the company to local groups around the world. 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. And if you don’t have any, talk to the customers of your competition. The best marketers don’t just know more about the latest channel, tool or tactic. Look at the customer research you’ve collected. It might seem that these three disciplines are quite different. Your audience has pain points and questions that they’re asking. Most marketers aren’t interested in doing hard things like reading a blog post this long. In other words, if you want your message to reach more people, your employees hold the key. “It’s more work to be transparent, because you’re sharing the data, the numbers, and you’ve got to explain the context. Renowned content marketer Gregory Ciotti leveraged guest blogging to build a database of. But up to 70% of B2B content goes unused. Conduct qualitative and quantitative analysis, how B2B marketers can identify key content marketing metrics and objectives, cause marketing or cause-related marketing, donated the entirety of their Black Friday sales, open letter to Microsoft as a full-page ad in the New York Times, video campaign the live chat company Drift ran on LinkedIn in 2018, we analyzed 100 Facebook ads from SaaS brands, The Sherlock Homeboy Technique: How To Reverse Engineer Your Content Marketing Strategy In 2020 & Beyond, B2B Influencer Marketing: Fiverr’s YouTube Influencer Campaign, How Zoom’s Zapps Ecosystem Could Change Their Business Forever. And when you’re analyzing this data, remember that you can find insights using two different approaches—qualitative and quantitative. About 89% of the B2B marketers employ content marketing according to the Content Marketing Institute. Storytelling Simplifies Your Message. They’d rather focus in the moment on trying to be successful, assuming there will be time for reflection afterwards. Thought leadership is a viable approach for any number of business types and marketing strategies, but it’s particularly powerful for reaching the power brokers within target businesses. B2B content marketing, or business-to-business content marketing, can be very challenging, and it’s only going to become more so in the coming years (if such a thing were possible).That’s why we wanted to create a seriously comprehensive, detailed guide to content marketing for B2B … If you want something you have to take it from someone else. Every six months, Slack selected a new charity to support through store proceeds, with a minimum $10,000 donation. What’s more, it has a key role to play at all stages of the user journey – from initial consideration to the moment of purchase – and in both mature and developing markets. 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. There’s an obvious reason for the longevity of word-of-mouth marketing – it works. Let’s hear ‘em. Think case studies, webinars, product demos, and anything else that targets the pain points of specific prospects. One of the main advantages of being customer-focused is being able to grow a community of people with similar interests. Alright, so now that we’ve touched on the *why* behind a documented & research-backed strategy—it’s time to talk about *how* you can do it. But before you dive right in, we want to share a handful of examples from the real world. Just because you can track and measure 100 different metrics doesn’t mean you should be tracking and measuring all 100. Given this final stat, it’s hardly surprising that almost two-thirds of marketers planned to spend more on influencer marketing in 2019. For example, Stripe offers guides and resources on everything from talent recruitment to using machine learning for fraud detection. A successful B2B content marketing strategy prompts the construction and progression of useful, best-in-class content produced by professionals. The same is true for B2B marketing strategies—a successful strategy could be one that increases sales, or generates awareness, or attracts more leads, or increases customer referrals, and the list can go on & on. And the more helpful your tool becomes, the more people will be talking about it. The protesters descended on San Francisco’s Moscone Center with the rallying cry “The internet is really neat! As with word-of-mouth marketing, employee activation – or at least the full benefits of it – won’t be achieved by sitting back and waiting for it to happen. But why should you be so concerned about the relationship between sales and marketing? I can categorically tell you that it’s not just about building a happier office. Plenty of B2B companies host conferences with the goal of helping to educate and inform. Let me know in the comments below: “When it comes to marketing, Sujan is the best. Having a marketing strategy also allows organizations to iterate on their marketing efforts over time. 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. Content marketing will likely surge in 2021 as B2B companies have big concepts to relay surrounding the state of their marketplace. Retargeted customers are three times more likely to click on an ad, while 26% of customers will return to a website after being retargeted. And it’s even better when giving away these free assets that help your audience also result in leads for your business. This type of honest communication simply isn’t common in the business world. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” — Sun Tzu in The Art of War. Companies with aligned sales and marketing teams: Live chat is often incorrectly pigeonholed as a way of dealing with complaints. 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. It might seem like an old-school tactic, but event marketing will be just as relevant in 2020 as it ever has been before. Instead, you’ve got to create a formal program that actively encourages employees to get involved. Content marketing is huge. You’re just paying to show up at the top of the list. By automating repetitive tasks like email marketing and social posting, you can reap real benefits in terms of sales and leads. Where is it strong? You need to be willing to own your position of strength. Both from a brand-building and lead generation (further below) standpoint. There’s still power in word of mouth, but many organizations aren’t in a position to let customers find them organically—and typically very slowly. (Image: Content Marketing … In order to do that, you first need to turn those strangers into visitors. Too often, marketers take a “write it and they will come” mentality to content creation. With account-based marketing (ABM), you’ll concentrate instead on targeting a specific set of accounts – say, a group of senior buyers at a company whose business you want. This is also a great place to include ideas for content that may answer those questions, how many searches that content might receive based on your research, and what format is best for that content. So what sort of events should you be running? That’s better described as employee advocacy. First of all—what does this *actually* mean? It’s because it works. Indeed, it’s been shown to be the most effective digital marketing tactic, with a median ROI of 122%. 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). Visitors type in their email address and the URL of their website, and the Website Grader will measure the site’s marketing effectiveness, generating a score between 0 and 100 based on factors including traffic, SEO and social media. Simply put, it helps businesses to close deals. 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. Plain and simple. And that’s where the qualitative and quantitative analysis comes into play. It started with half a dozen people posting videos during their daily commutes, and then things started to get really crazy when one of the product managers posted a video while on vacation: “She’s literally skiing and … she’s talking about how, you know, ‘Modern email is broken. Within two weeks, more than 100,000 organizations signed up for our service; most were introduced to it through articles about the launch. According to some estimates, it delivers three times more leads than outbound marketing, and costs 62% less. From content, to scrappy guerrilla tactics, to PR, Sujan always blows my mind with what he comes up with.”, Entrepreneur & Digital Marketing Strategist, closer alignment between sales and marketing, ROI they generate from influencer marketing, buying experience could be more personalized, satisfied with the level of personalization, organic impressions on Facebook and LinkedIn, building personal, face-to-face connections. Are click-through rates from Twitter posts impacting your business goal of generating more inbound leads? Time-Bound: A goal without a deadline is just a dream. It’s easy for a business to say they’re customer-focused. Over the past few years, Shopify’s also gotten in on the action—creating privacy, refund, and terms of service policy templates for its users (which are bundled with a free trial of the product, of course). You’ll have set your high-level business goals and connected them to marketing activities and metrics that carry you toward them. Other businesse… Adam Morgan described it as ‘like a knife-fight in a phone box.’ there isn’t anywhere to hide. And there’s another key component to paid media strategies – retargeting. Another business demonstrating their focus on customers in their marketing is customer success company Gainsight. And while most tactics don’t last, the rules of brand strategy have proven to be far more consistent. A marketing strategy that isn’t getting any likes or shares from us would be one that ignores the unique reach and appeal of social media influencers, and the many possibilities afforded by co-marketing. According to McKinsey, it’s the primary factor behind 20 to 50% of all purchasing decisions. Check out Finteza for automated funnels. Customers are savvy; they can easily differentiate the token gesture from the genuine attempt to improve their buying experience. The moment you write down your answers to these seven questions, you leap ahead of the 68% of B2B marketers who currently operate without a documented content strategy, and significantly boost your chances of joining the B2B marketers who describe their marketing as “effective.” For more advice on winning big with content… Moreover, 72% of marketers applaud content marketing for increasing leads and engagement. But this typically means the great service they provide ends with sales and support. such as that of Salesforce show that content marketing … The customer journey map is an opportunity for you to become familiar with the various touchpoints that are involved in your B2B marketing strategy as customers move through the sales funnel, as well as what influences their decisions and what questions they may have. Intercom also allows their trial users to attend product-specific webinars. Based on its findings, the grader will also suggest ways to improve inbound marketing efforts. The best B2B content marketing campaigns are built on sound strategy – one which delivers both the quality and quantity of content required and leverages the right channels for distribution. 2. They’ve created a Slack community for leaders to share their ideas, discuss industry trends, network and learn from guest speakers. Look at common behaviours and actions that are happening on your website, If you have a sales team, ask them what questions come up the most, If you have active social media pages, look at what people are messaging you, If you have a support team, ask them what problems are the most common. B2B stands for Business To Business, it refers to any content marketing strategy that is created to target an organization or business. 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. Use the Sherlock Homeboy Technique to see what’s working best for your competition. If you want to just open up Facebook and launch a campaign to target certain interests or demographics, the audience you’re targeting is going to be quite cold. Seeing how far his message had spread, he wondered what would happen if a hundred people at Drift posted videos to LinkedIn to promote a new product. Let’s talk lead generation tactics for B2B brands. So it would make sense for a few of your marketing tactics to look like this: That will help you turn strangers into website visitors. Not tomorrow. You’re demonstrating your willingness to do hard things, so how about one more: We challenge you to take one of the ideas you’ve read about and act on them. Slack is behind Frontiers, about the intersection of technology and organizational performance. Listed below are some of the best content marketing strategies and ideas that can be used to market your products to businesses: 1. According to LinkedIn and Edelman, 58% of decision-makers consume between one and four hours of thought leadership content every week. It’s just good, common sense. Every organization is chasing success. Specific: Explain exactly what it’s you’re trying to accomplish. So are lawyers that write custom privacy, refund and TOS policies. If you can create something that’s helpful for your target users or customers, they’re highly likely to be willing to give you their email address to get access. Where are they going to ask those questions? Among those who do, 26% of Facebook users who click on ads have, The typical global Facebook user clicks on a median of, 91% of executives say LinkedIn is their first choice for finding. It’s difficult to understand a context sometimes, but it’s easier … In fact, 92% of customers say they’re satisfied with their live chat experiences – a higher proportion than any other communications channel. The culture of cause and purpose association has thrived even without Chouinard at the helm. And just like that, you now have the contact information of someone who’s expressed interest in something you offer. What’s more, they’re likely to spend 60% more on their purchases. HubSpot hosts Inbound, a conference dedicated to marketing, sales, and business. Those relationships may end up being more valuable than the product or service that is being provided. If you stand for nothing, you will find nobody against you, and nobody for you.”. When you visit Capterra and see that Notion has an overall rating of 4.5 stars, tons of glowing reviews, and starts at $4 a month, odds are you’re going to click through to Notion’s product page to at least see what all the hype is about. And as an added bonus, it’s no surprise that the best free tools are also often the most linked to free tools. 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. Are you going to use content like blog posts & videos to attract people first? If you can give customers the tools to tackle their own problems to a certain standard, they’ll value the experience, gain confidence, and remember that it was YOU that helped them. Indeed, just 39% of sellers say they believe thought leadership can assist with their lead generation efforts. Take a look at the current search market share: That means 9 out of 10 searches are happening on Google-owned properties. At Foundation, we start every content marketing strategy with a B2B customer journey map. While Intercom may talk a lot about the features of their platforms, their public-facing webinars are intended to be as valuable as possible, and that’s what will lead people to poke around their websites and sign up for trial accounts. The current tally is at 45 different tools available for download—with everything from buyer personas to invoice templates making the cut: But one of their most well-known tools launched in 2007 (the early days)—the Website Grader. In 2019 we analyzed 100 Facebook ads from SaaS brands to see what tactics, campaigns, and ad types were working the best—be sure to give that post a read as well if you’re planning to launch an ad campaign in the near future. Is it really worth taking resources away from executing on marketing tactics to put together this plan—especially when your marketing team is small (or non-existent)? You can narrow it down to target only people that visited your pricing page but didn’t convert, added a product to their cart but didn’t checkout, or just visited more than one blog post. 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. I didn’t put it first on the list for nothing. The big takeaway that we’ll repeat here is this: Actually talk to your customers. For example: Which HubSpot blog posts are attracting the most backlinks? Don’t forget to hit “bookmark” so you can come back to the examples we shared down the road. Surprisingly, while buyers clearly engage with and enjoy thought leadership, vendors are yet to be convinced. Chances are your B2B marketing strategy that’s in the works as you read this post is connected to increasing revenue in some fashion. This is the template we use at Foundation: (You can download a copy of your own here). Depending on your business and marketing goals, the tactics you outline are going to look slightly different. Here’s what they share directly on their about page: Companies are always eager to talk about their successes, but never their failures, even though that’s where the valuable stuff is. (Hint: It starts with a good amount of research). With a little effort, your live chat function can be one of your most potent and productive sales channels. In 2016, they donated the entirety of their Black Friday sales to environmental groups fighting climate change ($10 million, a 300% increase in sales over the previous year). 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. The first question you’re probably asking is this: Why is a documented and well-researched marketing strategy so important? Find out what your organization is knocking out of the park and promote yourself with it. This approach really works, with the average buyer viewing five or more pieces from the winning vendor before deciding to make a purchase. One in three customers say they wish the buying experience could be more personalized, while just a fifth say they’re satisfied with the level of personalization they currently receive. People tend to love things that help them solve problems. Specifically, long-form content delivers much better results than short-form content. Compared to non-segmented campaigns, segmented email campaigns enjoy: If you want to excel at email marketing, then you should utilize a professional tool like Mailchimp. And you’ll have a (rough) map of which metrics matter most and how exactly they tie into your overall business goals. Very few companies have gone completely under from a single bad marketing decision. 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. And if you were to ask them the same question a decade from now, they’d probably give you the same answer. Having new stuff to play with online is always cool, but the reason that offering free tools is a great brand development strategy is that it’s all about empowering the customer to do things they wouldn’t be able to on their own. On average, a company’s employees have ten times more connections than the company itself. If you’ve ever seen a growth marketer on the heels … Strategy steps that you’re getting hung up on? Some of the biggest adopters of this trend are the business software review sites G2, Capterra and TrustRadius, and as a result they’re getting huge amounts of traffic. Everyone needs toilet paper and (almost) everyone wants new shoes, but far fewer people will rush out to buy surface drills, ultrasound machines or a brand new customer support software on a whim. Another group of actors pretended to be a news crew covering the “protesters” (who were advocating for Salesforce’s cloud-based system). In any case, using a good email marketing tool can boost your email marketing results multifold. Over the years, Benioff has grown fond of these guerrilla marketing tactics—using the actions of competitor companies to put a spotlight on his own brand. #2 for 70+ branded terms.#3 for 60+ branded terms.#4 for 80+ branded terms. It is for businesses that sell services or products to other organizations or businesses, unlike consumers, usually use B2B marketing strategy … The company couldn’t fight Microsoft in a battle of resources (see $1.27 trillion with a “T” market cap), but Slack’s role as the king of communication meant they weren’t afraid to offer some tips for success to the competitor infringing on its turf. There isn’t any place for bystanders. While paid social ads are similar to Google ads in the sense that you’re paying to reach your audience right away—the stage itself is a bit different. In this post we’re going to share a 5-step process you can follow to create the roots of your B2B marketing strategy, and walk through a handful of examples and specific tactics you can include. 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. It is also a good idea to remove clutter to make your marketing automation effective and cost efficient. Offering downloadable assets is one of the most common lead generation strategies—and for good reason. Expect this upward trend to continue next year. Three in five digital marketers say their biggest challenge is generating traffic and leads. One of the best examples of employee empowerment as a B2B marketing strategy was the video campaign the live chat company Drift ran on LinkedIn in 2018—a campaign that was planned only five days before it was launched, yet generated 3 million views and resulted in the highest single-day traffic in the company’s history. Before you make any decisions, let’s take a look at the common content marketing funnel: You’re trying to bring in strangers and convert them into leads. But word-of-mouth marketing isn’t just about doing your job and hoping happy customers will refer you. And once you have that information, you can start to reach out (manually or with an automated email sequence). Generally speaking, the primary goal of any business is to make money. Effective B2B marketing allows marketing teams to effectively educate, acquire, and retain customers. It’s also worth using resource lists and pain-point content (such as service/tool review content related to problems) as a key source of traffic for B2B lead gen. One of the most prominent companies to embrace cause and purpose association is the outdoor clothing and gear company Patagonia. And in order to win those customers and become profitable (or stay that way), your company is going to need a marketing strategy. Some Content Marketing Strategies For B2B Markets. ABM makes salespeople’s lives much easier, because you’re creating content and campaigns that are specifically targeted to the prospects you’re chasing. Whether you’re the size of Apple and Patagonia, or you’re still in the early days trying to win your first 100 customers—that primary goal is still the same. 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. Why you need a strategy. Don’t be fooled, either—customer research goes beyond anecdotal evidence that your audience is on a specific channel or is purchasing a certain way. This doesn’t mean you need to ship a press release for every single thing that ever happens with your company, but promoting and announcing that your company is top rated SaaS product in your category can affirm your position at the top. Companies that are truly customer-focused are investing in long-term relationships with their customers. But they share a common theme – leveraging the authority of third parties to promote your own brand or product. Define what result or metric you want to focus on, then study your competition. Where they’re asking the questions, of course. Growth Hacking is the process of designing and running experiments to optimize and improve results across the full marketing funnel from acquisition to retention and beyond. 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 customer journey map is an opportunity for you to become familiar with the various touchpoints that are involved in your B2B marketing strategy … In fact, longer posts are nine times more effective at generating leads. Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis istpoe natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque eopsloi. There’s no denying that it’s an extremely effective customer service channel. With one advertisement, Slack positioned itself as both the underdog and the master. The user gets actionable insights and suggestions. 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. That’s exactly what Salesforce leadership did in the early days: They picked an enemy to oppose—their biggest rival, Siebel Systems. 92% of marketers said their organization sees content as a critical business asset. With social ads, your customers are not actively looking for you. HubSpot fills their pipeline with well-populated leads. It sheds light on what content strategies are … In order for someone to win, someone has to lose. What’s more, employee re-shares have a click-through rate that’s 2.1 times higher than the original company post. researching which questions are getting the most search volume in Google, and using the findings to prioritize your customers’ most common problems.). They’ve created and launched dozens of free tools over the years. But what “success” actually looks like varies wildly from one company to the next, and how “success” is measured varies just as much. “Is ABC a major pain point for you?”) you’ll miss out on what their pain points *actually* are. Here’s a great example from their CEO, Joel Gascoigne: He talked about how they tried to scale too quickly and had to let 10 of their recent hires go. It’s a two-day customer and developer conference focused on Twilio’s products, one-on-one engagement with experts, networking and building stronger relationships with customers. And here’s how you can get started with a journey map: At its core, the customer journey map helps you understand your different buyer personas and identify opportunities to get their attention. More customers, better retention, higher quality pipeline—all of these goals have one thing in common: Revenue. More than two-thirds of B2B marketers worldwide invest in social ads. I’ve seen countless brands that claim to be doing employee activation, when in reality they aren’t. Just because it’s collecting data doesn’t mean you have insights in a bottle. Put simply, cause and purpose association is tying your business to an issue or a topic that is more important to the world than your bottom line. At Foundation, we start every content marketing strategy with a B2B customer journey map. Employee activation goes far beyond that. After all, some customers will need a nudge to refer you, even if the service you delivered was world-class. A successful content marketing strategy where SEO is a major part is going to lead to long-term success when executed well, but the other search-related tactic you can start executing right away is Google Ads. Utilizing a combination of marketing tactics, data, creativity, and specific tools to help execute fast is key. In terms of the right technology, lots of tools, like Chrome Extensions, can help in executing these growth experiments successfully.