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?

Valentines Day is a holiday that some people look forward to, while others dread it’s very existence.  Let’s face it; no one likes to be alone on Valentine’s Day. Much like personal relationships, business relationships take effort. What are you doing this year to ensure you’re spending time with someone special and keeping your conversion funnel full?

The typical B2B buying cycle is anywhere from 3 to 12 months.  It can be challenging to maintain appropriate touch points throughout a longer sales cycle in a way that will encourage a potential customer to convert, rather than slipping out of the funnel.

Utilizing analytics is a great way for companies to gain insight into customer and prospect behavior and make adjustments to their marketing strategy based on that insight. However, a long sales cycle requires analytics be used beyond simply connecting purchase to channel and adjusting the marketing mix accordingly.

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.

[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 final interview in our series on B2B Marketing Innovation comes from Paul Gillin, a veteran journalist, author and strategist. He’s the author of several books on new media including, Social Marketing to the Business Customer, with Eric Schwartzman.  Paul is giving a sold out workshop and an interactive presentation on influence.

In this interview, Paul shares the truth about the role influence plays in B2B Marketing, the importance of community building, common mistakes with marketing planning, deciding on the right tactical mix and his favorite B2B Marketing tools.

Please tell us a little about you and the kind of b2b marketing work you’re most excited about. Solve any tough ones lately?

Is your B2B marketing feeling “old fashioned” and out of date? Have your white papers, direct mail and webinars been called out as “boring”? Maybe you’re losing interest with prospects because corporate chest beating about products and services just isn’t enough anymore?

There’s a growing movement amongst progressive business to business marketers to break free of stale and antiquated digital marketing tactics. While consumer product marketing has long been associated with more interesting and compelling marketing efforts, modern B2B marketers include numerous companies that are creating amazing programs to attract, engage and convert business buyers with infotaining content, compelling social engagement and memorable calls to action.

Finding a way to influence your prospects, customers, and company advocates is an essential part of doing business in today’s digital world.  Finding different methods of creating influence is essential with complex purchasing processes often present with B2B marketing.

Fortunately, we have the insight of savvy B2B marketers who are out in the field, developing, testing and implementing best practices that are willing to share with our readers here at Online Marketing Blog.

To that end, next up in our series of B2B Marketing expert interviews is PTC’s Alan Belniak.  As Director of Social Media Marketing, Alan focuses on product lifecycle management developing strategy and innovating the right mix of social media tactics to create influence and and value with their business customers.

When most marketers think of innovation it usually refers to improving upon or coming up with a new way of accomplishing a particular goal.  Perhaps it’s updating a marketing process, or introducing new services or solutions to better meet customer needs.  Innovating within B2B marketing can be tough. Many may argue that “it’s all been done before”.  The reality is, there is always an opportunity to innovate.

In preparation for the upcoming MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Forum TopRank Online Marketing has partnered with MarketingProfs to put together a series of interviews from some of B2B marketing’s biggest stars.

Kicking off our interview series is Cisco’s Tim Washer.  Tim is a corporate storyteller that produces comedies, documentaries and someday, an informercial.  Tim’s work has appeared in Advertising Age and The New York Times, and his comedy credits include the Late Show with David Letterman and SNL.

“There’s a common belief that it’s tougher to come up with new marketing ideas for B2B than for consumer products. But most experienced marketers know that innovation exists within B2B as much or more as it does with B2C marketing – just in different ways.  Please share a tip on how companies can come up with new and innovative ideas for their B2B marketing efforts.”

That’s the question I posed to some of the top B2B marketing professionals for the MarketingProfs B2B Marketing Innovation eBook project that TopRank Online Marketing is working on. The B2B Forum is coming up fast in Boston Oct 3-5 and there’s more interest now than ever, in how to innovate.

Free B2B buyer persona development tool

Just as every B2B company stakes a claim to a market position, each of them has a story to share. The challenge is in figuring out how to share that story in a way that aligns with the needs and priorities of prospects and customers. But, it’s not just sharing the story. It’s about making the story so compelling that it elevates perceptions of value and urgency resulting in more qualified leads and faster purchasing momentum.

This is the sage advice from Ardath Albee, a B2B Marketing industry thought leader and practitioner that consistently delivers useful information. In fact, Ardath was one of the participants in our Content Marketing Secrets project and has been in the B2B content marketing game a very long time. The following post is a summary of her presentation at the recent Content Marketing World.