Online Marketing Blog

According to a CMI and MarketingProfs study, 91% of B2B Marketers are using content marketing and that means a few things:

First, it means content marketing has gained critical mass within the popular marketing mix and any company in a competitive industry would be hard pressed to attract business without it.

Second, it means competition to stand out with your brand’s content is only going to get harder as more companies adopt content marketing best practices and mature in their skills.

As companies evolve from simply recognizing the important role of content and experimenting with it, to achieving content creation competency and quality, the need to optimize content marketing skills becomes increasingly important. But where can B2B marketers find new ideas and expand their opportunities to grow content marketing capabilities?

While I’ve been in New York this week for the B2B Content2Conversion conference, I’ve been reflecting on some of the most common issues I see with companies trying to leverage content for increasing leads and sales.

Many companies new to content marketing miss important steps and without checklists or processes, content marketing contribution to leads and sales can be unimpressive.

Of course, not all content needs to “sell” in terms of inquiries or transactions, but for content designed with lead generation in mind, there should be some accountability or you won’t have anything to count.

While deciding the creative on your next infographic, the viral hook of your next video or which awesome thought leaders will be in your next ebook, step back for a second and consider these basic and often overlooked considerations for aligning content with marketing objectives.

In Driving ROI Across B2B Marketing Strategies at SES New York yesterday, Maura Ginty from Autodesk aimed to teach marketers the context of B2B digital, alongside the principles of B2B marketing. In sharing her A to Z tips on B2B ROI improvements, Ginty gave marketers 26 great takeaways to help prove and build the value of their digital marketing strategy.

With host Laura Roth, Senior Conference Manager, SES Conference & Expo on hand to guide the conversation and Lauren Vaccarello, Senior Director of Online Marketing, Salesforce.com at our digital disposal (she was tweeting in to the session), there was a lot to be learned from these experienced marketers.

A- Audience. You have to be able to reach the right audience members with the right message, at the right time.

Social media marketing for B2B brands requires creativity, scalability and buy-in across the organization. Just after the Tuesday morning keynote at SES New York, Adriel Sanchez, Senior Director of Demand Generation at SAP and Jasmine Sandler, CEO at Agent-cy, shared with attendees a framework for building a B2B social media machine in their session led by TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden.

Social media management changes constantly, Sandler reminded participants as she took the stage. The opportunity for B2B brands continues to grow; one-to-one conversations are happening across social platforms, blogs, forums, and elsewhere across the web.

Companies need to first understand the social media landscape – where are we today. where are we going, who is already here? If you’re into social media, you need to have a global perspective, Sandler said. Marketers must be thinking of social and its relationship with:

Marketing trends come and go, but what other “shiny object” topic has caused more debate than social media?

On the one hand, recent studies cited by eMarketer show that two thirds of the U.S. internet population will belong to a social network by 2013. On the other hand, a study by Harvard Business Review showed that 29% of the 2,100 organizations surveyed felt it was difficult to see the benefit of social media for their business purposes.

It’s true that with something as large, fast changing and ubiquitous as the social web there will be zealots and dissenters as well as the comfortably numb. The fact that opportunists make unsubstantiated claims as self-anointed social media experts doesn’t help matters when it comes to understanding social fact from fiction.

It’s day 2 of SES Chicago, and the online marketing education is flowing full force.  I saw an excellent presentation about building a killer B2B social media strategy with Adriel Sanchez (@Adriel_S) of SAP.  With the sea of platforms, tactics, and schools of thought around B2B social media, it can be difficult to put together an actionable strategy that gets real results.

Follow the steps below to get your B2B social media strategy working for your business.

1. Forget Social Media, Think Content Marketing

Social media works best as a component of an overall content strategy.  The key is to think like a publisher, not a marketer.  This means avoiding the common pitfalls of being overly self-promotional or too sales oriented.

Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs have partnered with Brightcove to research and produce a very useful report for North American marketers:

B2B Content Marketing: 2013 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends  

As with most joint venture reports from CMI and MarketingProfs, this report has been shared and written about pretty enthusiastically in the media and blogosphere. It’s easy to understand why: B2B marketers “get” that they need content as a more substantial part of their overall marketing mix, but they need to know more about how.

There are many sharable nuggets in this report which you can view embedded at the end of this post.  I also thought it would be handy for other marketers/authors/speakers like myself that need to write articles, reports and give presentations to break some of the findings out into one line stats that would be easy to copy and share.

On occasion we connect with smart people and ideas we think are worth sharing as a guest post here at Online Marketing Blog. Today, I’d like to introduce you to Heidi Ambler, Director of Social Business at IBM.  Heidi has over 20 years with IBM where she leads a team responsible for their enterprise social software business.

In a digital world where technology and  consumer behaviors are changing rapidly, Heidi makes the argument for better alignment between IT and marketing as a path towards greater success and competitive advantage.

According to recent survey results, 60 percent of marketers cite a lack of alignment with the company’s IT department as the biggest obstacle to reaching today’s digitally empowered and social savvy consumers.

[We're trying something different and including this sponsored post from Oli Gardner, Co-Founder & Creative director at Unbounce, a sponsor for the Minneapolis launch of Lee's book Optimize.  You may know Unbounce as that clever service that gives marketers and marketing agencies an easy way to create, publish and test landing pages without IT or developers.]

As a digital marketing agency that does a substantial amount of consulting in the B2B Marketing space, we’ve paid a lot of attention to the topic here at Online Marketing Blog with tips posts and the recent B2B Marketing Innovation eBook we put together in partnership with MarketingProfs.

Nobody likes to make a mistake or fail at something. Even so, the beauty of an error is the fact that you can learn from the experience. It’s even better if you can learn from someone else’s gaffe – before you make a similar blunder.

The B2B content marketing stories you’re about to read are true.  The mistakes listed here are commonly experienced in digital marketing and weren’t major catastrophes. But each one provides a great teachable moment that could help you think about what to look for in your own marketing programs and how they may be improved for enhanced results.

Building the case for content marketing is an ongoing battle and while a huge number of companies are not on board with “brand as publisher” yet, many are. They “get it” but are in search of more practical advice on the how.

That’s what Michael Brenner, Senior Director, Global Integrated Marketing and Content Strategy at SAP and co-founder of Business to Community provided at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum last week in his session: Content Marketing: Moving From the “Why” to the “How”.

The world is changing faster than we can keep up with. Just a few years ago, no one used terms like “social media”. Today, it’s unusual not to. We went from not sharing much of anything to sharing a lot. Our kids are going to grow up with virtually everything digitally documented.

The importance of integrating earned, owned, paid and shared media couldn’t be any greater and this week I’ll be giving a track keynote at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum conference in Boston on just that. My presentation will focus on the essential strategies and tactics for sales funnel optimization success with content, search and social media marketing.

To get things started, here are some handy general stats on search, social and content marketing plus quite a few specifically for B2B marketing:

50 Billion – By 2020, Ericcson predicts there will be 50 billion internet connected devices. The world population is estimated to be at around 7 -8 billion.

Social Media Marketing:

60% of B2B decision makers use social media, according to a Global Web Index study reported by Social Media B2B, late 2011.