Online Marketing Blog

They say three’s a charm and that’s certainly true with the third installment of our series investigating the top content marketing “secret agents” that will be presenting at Content Marketing World next week. “Mums the word” might be tricky with this one, since the data is coming from secret agent Michael Brenner, Senior Director of Integrated Marketing and Content Strategy at SAP. Michael is also the author of B2B Marketing Insider, the co-founder of Business 2 Community and the founding editor for the SAP Business Innovation blog.

This highly decorated content marketing secret agent will now share his take on all the content marketing hype, his session on one of the most pressing issues facing many marketing organizations ”Content Marketing: How to Transform Your Organization/Culture for Content Success”, top content marketing tools and his tips on managing long term creation of quality content.

Summer in Minnesota is my favorite. Warm weather, green grass and puffy, white clouds flittering across the sky; it’s fabulous.

In particular I’m excited for the month of August because there are 2 great events happening in Minnesota.

Event #1 – Explore Minneapolis August 16-17, where digital and social media marketers are gathering to explore the latest in online marketing and I’m presenting on Optimizing for B2B Audiences.

Event #2 – The “Great Minnesota Get Together”, where mini-doughnuts, Sweet Martha’s Cookies, and Corn on the Cob are must-have’s on the list.

What do these 2 events have in common? It might seem like nothing, but let me explain: One of the key challenges most B2B Marketers face is selling a product or service where multiple end-users and decision makers are involved.

Most forms of online B2B marketing and advertising focus on attracting and engaging business customers through a sales cycle to create awareness and interest, through consideration and ultimately to purchase. That’s reasonable since there’s a clear investment and return.

While a lot of social media-savvy business to business companies are leveraging social channels to engage with communities and for customer service, most implementations of corporate social media marketing are no different than any other sales-focused marketing effort. Expectations are high to influence a social return on investment (ROI).

In fact, a recent survey by PulsePoint Group and The Economist Intelligence unit reports that, “Executives who said their companies had established an extensive social media presence reported a return on investment that was more than four times that of companies with little or no social network engagement activity.”

If a picture’s worth a thousand words, then a video must be worth millions. The thing about content marketing is that it’s not just about informing and educating, but creating an experience that your audience can feel. Whether you’re a consumer or business customer, decisions are not made solely on logic, but emotion. As content marketers, we have an opportunity to tie into the experiential state of information influence by leveraging media like video.

eMarketer reports a lot of support for the growth in video investment: Online video is expected to grow 55% this year and is the top format for content marketing. Stats about YouTube are pretty compelling.

Did you know?

• Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month
• Over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube

This week at the PRSA Digital Impact Conference Vanessa DiMauro, CEO of Leader Networks talked to attendees about the benefits of online communities as part of a B2B social media strategy.

According to DiMauro, nearly 2/3 of organizations surveyed are engaged in private, online communities hosted by companies that sell them computer hardware, software or services.

The average visit in an online B2B community is 10 minutes, with 1 visit every 5-7 days.

What B2B organization wouldn’t want roughly 40 minutes of time per month with members to help solve problems, learn how they are using tools and what topics they are most interested in?

Building an online community gives organizations an opportunity to strategically connect with its audience in meaningful and sometimes deeper ways through private interactions.

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.