Online Marketing Blog

New Report on B2B Content Marketing for 2012:

This week started off right with the new report (pdf) from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs:  ”B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Benchmarks, Budgets & Trends”. The report offers a great mix of insight into most and least effective content marketing tactics, social media tools, measurement, budgets and compelling data points like:

• 9 in 10 organizations market with content
• Content marketers use 8 different content marketing tactics (on average) in their mix
• The most popular content marketing tactics included social media, blogs, newsletters, case studies and events
• The least effective content marketing tactics: podcasts, mobile content, digital magazines

One of the sessions I was most looking forward to at Content Marketing World was one given by Ardath Albee @ardath421 CEO of Marketing Interactions (blog) and Author of eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale.

It’s one thing to create a content marketing strategy, it’s another thing to execute it in a way that works out the way you planned.

Buyer experience is important! 43.7% of buyers say they’re taking more time to research purchases. (DemandGen Report) Each person receives 5,000 messages each day (and that stat is 2 years old) imagine what it is today. The amount of information that confronts each person online every day is overwhelming, so people begin to shut down or become better filters of information.

Day one of Content Marketing World was a great mix of catching up with old friends, making new ones and of course, great content. On the BtoB track I sat in on a session including speakers with two different presentations from SAS and Intel. Since they were so different, I split them into 2 posts. This is part two of that session.

Speaker: Pam Didner @pdidner Global Integrated Marketing Manager, Intel
Presentation: Intel Inside Out: How to Globalize Your Editorial Planning

Pam’s presentation covered her journey over the past year and a half to “try” and globalize Intel’s editorial planning.

Intel’s 2011 Marketing Objectives and Strategy:
- Objective: Increase Intel’s brand relevance
- The Hero (Product):  Intel Core Processors (i3, i5, i7)
- Audience: IT Managers
- Communications Strategy: Signal business advantages, Stimulate interests, Engage with IT.

One of the big questions in the social media marketing space is whether social media is the place for B2B marketing. As companies begin to understand for every B2B company, there’s also a “C” aka people behind the business (@garyvee).

Once B2B companies realize that buyers discover, consume and share information on social channels just like any other “human” they seek to understand how social participation and marketing fits.

The session, “B2B Social Media: Not As Different As You Think” at Dreamforce in San Francisco aimed to help answer that question with presentations from three B2B Social Media Marketing practitioners. The speakers included: Gordon Evans from salesforce.com, Brian Stokoe from Caterpillar, and Maura Ginty from Autodesk.

B2B Marketing Best Practices 2011

We’ve been fans of MarketingSherpa reports, guides and handbooks for many years, recently reviewing their SEO Benchmark Report for 2011. As passionate B2B Marketers, we’re always on the lookout for qualitative information to improve our B2B client marketing as well as our own. That’s why I’m pretty motivated by the new 2011 B2B Marketing Advanced Practices Handbook from MarketingSherpa.

Led by Senior Research Analyst, Jen Doyle, this Handbook is nearly 200 pages of research based best practices, graphs, worksheets and of course, their FUEL Methodology for elevating B2B Marketing effectiveness. Here’s a rundown of the report:

“Build it and they will come”.

It’s a well-known and often over-used quote from the movie, “Field of Dreams”, used to describe the fallacy of great content as a marketing tool. In my opinion, great content isn’t great until someone shares it. And they share it with their friends, and so on and so on.

With content marketing, great content is the beginning not the end objective. An effective content marketing strategy includes information about target buyer personas, search keywords and social topics, an editorial plan and a plan for promoting all the high quality content being created. Today’s Internet and social web are full of information overload. Buyers can easily be distracted and so it’s important to stand out and stay connected.

Staying on top of social media and networking trends is essential for B2B marketers. Forrester Research predicts, “B2B companies will spend $54 million on social media marketing in 2014, up from just $11 million in 2009.” via eMarketer.  Data and research are key to forecasting and strategy development but not many B2B companies invest the time and effort into such initiatives outside of link-baity Infographics.

Luckily, there are many analysts and agencies that serve the B2B Marketing industry that do conduct regular research into topics like social media marketing.

Here are 5 meaty reports published in 2011 that can help B2B marketers understand the direction new media and social media is taking in terms of overall strategy, industry trends, unique audience and application differences between social media platforms and measurement.

It’s a persistent question: Is social media and networking appropriate for B2B marketing?  There are many ways to answer that question and one of the most engaging is through statistics and information presented as an infographic. My team knows I’m a big fan of using visual assets to persuade and I’ve been a fan of information graphics since XPLANE’s amazing work started appearing in popular business magazines years ago.

Besides using infographics to explain social media in the B2B space, there are a growing number of B2B marketers using infographics in their mix, such as this case study about Cisco.

Here are 5 useful B2B social media marketing infographics that help tell the tale of social media and B2B marketing working together. Click on each image for the large version.

Oftentimes marketers budget, plan and implement online marketing tactics in silos. When it comes to SEO, Social and Content Marketing – integration is the best practice and that means a tremendous competitive opportunity. Why Social Media and SEO for B2B? The intersection of social media and search engine optimization is a perfect match for B2B Marketer for several reasons:

Long B2B buying cycles have always involved engagement through content. The opportunity for coordinated Social SEO is in part inspired by buyer information discovery, consumption and sharing habits that have changed with the influence of social technology and search.

B2B marketers have joined the social media marketing movement in droves. In fact, Forrester Research predicts that B2B firms will spend $54 million on social media marketing in 2014, up from just $11 million in 2009 (eMarketer B2B Social Media Marketing Heats Up).

Unfortunately, many of those efforts are entirely tactical, methodical and without a true understanding of the “social” aspect of social media marketing.  B2B marketers that are early in their social media marketing maturity level tend to focus on message distribution such as Tweeting or posting Facebook links mostly to their own content vs. engaging with customers on a human level. That one-way communication profile doesn’t engender discussions and sharing, so social traffic level increases tend to plateau pretty early.

Content marketing is essential for B2B businesses providing both qualitative and quantitative returns.  And while 6 in 10 marketers are planning to increase content marketing spends this year, success-rates still vary greatly as it’s a new concept for most.

Maria Pergolino, director of marketing for Marketo (a TopRank Online Marketing client) shared a presentation at the Marketo User Summit on getting the message out, focused on social media and content marketing tips/tricks.

How do you succeed in content marketing?

• Create content that sells
• Create a content map
• Optimize content for search
• Repurpose content
• Learn to succeed even in situations with little or no content

Kipp Bodnar of HubSpot

This post is one of a series of liveblogs from the 2010 MIMA Summit.

B2B social media can be surprisingly successful with a specific focus on lead generation.  If social media is to be taken seriously for B2B by marketing decision makers, it needs to maintain a focus on business objectives and driving sales vs. “fluff”.

B2B companies are actually in a much better position to use social media as a marketing channel than B2C companies.  They often have a much clearer expectation for what a customer does and what they want.

B2B companies also have deep internal expertise.  It’s not uncommon for top B2B companies to employ thought leaders in their specific industry.  However, there’s a solid argument that for many B2B companies, online marketing and social media might not be a fit.