B2B Marketing Blog

How to Create More Authentic Influencer-Driven Content to Attract Qualified Prospects

Joshua Nite on Nov 14th, 2022
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

When you think about who is influential in your industry, you likely think about professional influencers first. These are the consultants, public speakers and authors, the ones who give keynote speeches and have huge followings on social media.

These folks are absolutely essential as part of your influencer mix. Their reach, knowledge and professionalism are incredibly valuable.

However, you need more than just these folks for authentic and useful content. To create the kind of experience that earns the attention of qualified prospects, you need to expand your definition of what an influencer is — and what influencer content should look like.

Here’s how to optimize your influencer marketing to create authentic experiences that attract your most valuable audience.

How to Create More Authentic Influencer-Driven Content to Attract Qualified Prospects

B2B Marketing News: B2B Brand Awareness Data, New Salesforce & HubSpot Reports, YouTube Adds Guest Streaming, & Rising Digital Ad Spend

Lane Ellis on Nov 11th, 2022
Online Marketing News

B2B brands shouldn’t fear rejection, but being unknown
91 percent of potential customers don’t actively reject any B2B brands, while increasing brand awareness remains one of the top challenge that B2B marketers face, as unawareness has significant variability by brand, according to newly-released report data from The B2B Institute. Marketing Week

“The marketing industry treats B2B like it’s some weird niche that we can just ignore. But B2B isn’t a niche — it’s a goldmine. Half the economy is B2B. And it’s the better half.” — Peter Weinberg of @b2binstitute Click To Tweet

Overheard at B2B World Fest: ‘Pursue passion and purpose, and profits will follow’
B2B marketing has taken a move towards offering more experimental content including sight, sound, and motion, while B2B organization employees are increasingly seeing improvements to their well-being as more important than career advancement — two of several findings of interest to B2B marketers shared during the B2B World Fest event, as The Drum examines. The Drum

B2B Marketing News: B2B Brand Awareness Data, New Salesforce & HubSpot Reports, YouTube Adds Guest Streaming, & Rising Digital Ad Spend

5 New Search Opportunities B2B Marketers Need To Know In 2023

Lane Ellis on Nov 9th, 2022
B2B Marketing, Search Engines, Search Marketing, SEO

What do B2B marketers need to know about search in 2023?

B2B marketing and search have always had a complex relationship, and 2023 will undoubtedly see new shifts arise in numerous areas, from how search engines deal with human versus artificial intelligence (AI)-generated content, to indexing a partially or fully-siloed metaverse, combating dwindling organic search opportunities, where to best invest paid search advertising dollars, and key SEO fine tuning challenges.

Let’s turn our attention to each of these five areas of search in B2B marketing, and take a look at the changes marketers will need to adapt to in 2023 and beyond.

5 New Search Opportunities B2B Marketers Need To Know In 2023

Why Relationship Marketing Is Essential To B2B Lead Generation

Nick Nelson on Nov 7th, 2022
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing, Conversion Optimization

One of the oldest, and creepiest, adages about the value of content marketing is that you can’t ask someone to marry you on the first date.

Weird as it might feel, there’s a good reason this metaphor has held sway. A marriage is a serious and high-stakes commitment, and nobody wants to enter one without truly feeling like they know and trust their future partner.

In the business realm, purchase influencers and decision makers are under huge pressure to get it right. It’s not enough to understand the product, its price, or its features. Buyers want to believe in the brand and the people behind it.

Increasingly, significant business purchases need to be buoyed by a strong relationship. (The non-romantic type, to be clear.) Smart and strategic content marketing is how those relationships are built.

Why Relationship Marketing Is Essential To B2B Lead Generation

B2B Marketing News: Rising B2B Content Creation Budgets, Proving ROI Is Top ABM Challenge, & Google’s Updated Business Profiles

Lane Ellis on Nov 4th, 2022
Online Marketing News

5 Predictions For B2B CMOs To Win In 2023 [Forrester Report]
20 percent more B2B demand teams will report to sales in 2023, with 10 percent of marketing automation budgets moving from transformation to resilience, while 40 percent of firms will shift to cloud-native-first strategies — three of numerous findings of interest to B2B marketers contained in recently-released B2B CMO report data. Forbes

What’s Driving Budget Changes for B2B Marketers? [Survey]
43 percent of B2B marketers have said that their marketing budgets have increased since 2021, with 32 percent noting a decrease, with the top reasons for budget changes being inflation, the pandemic, economic recession, and world geopolitical unstability, according to newly-released survey data. MarketingCharts

B2B Marketing News: Rising B2B Content Creation Budgets, Proving ROI Is Top ABM Challenge, & Google’s Updated Business Profiles

Community Influence: B2B Influencer Marketing & The Ascent of Digital Communities

Lane Ellis on Nov 2nd, 2022
B2B Marketing, Influencer Marketing

Just how important have digital communities become today, and why does the rising trust we place in them harmonize so well with B2B influencer marketing?

It’s no secret that the world has become digital-first during the pandemic, but one change that may surprise many is just how important online communities have become.

People have shifted to identifying the most closely with their online communities, for the first time surpassing traditional non-digital community groups, a change borne out by recent survey data.

A simultaneous pandemic change has seen trust in brands and marketers falling significantly, with 50 percent of U.S. consumers finding it difficult to trust brands since the pandemic began, according to report data from Salesforce.

Community Influence: B2B Influencer Marketing & The Ascent of Digital Communities

10 Creative Horror Movies to Inspire Your B2B Marketing

Joshua Nite on Oct 31st, 2022
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing, Online Marketing

We’ve been saying for years that B2B marketing should be emotional, exciting, entertaining and engaging — in short, creative. Great marketing not only wins those industry awards, it gets better results.

We’ve proven as much with the work our agency puts out. But it’s nice to get some third-party vindication. LinkedIn’s B2B Institute just published a report called “Cashing in on Creativity.” They analyzed over 1500 B2B ads and found two huge takeaways:

Only 5% of ads have highly creative messaging
This top 5% can drive a 10-20x bigger market share growth

In other words, we don’t have to measure creativity in moonbeams and rainbows. We can measure in dollars and cents.

10 Creative Horror Movies to Inspire Your B2B Marketing

B2B Marketing News: Top B2B Demand Gen Content Study, LinkedIn’s Record Engagement, Key Social Media Trends, & Google’s My Ad Center

Lane Ellis on Oct 28th, 2022
Online Marketing News

Fifth of B2B marketers say proving effectiveness is their ‘biggest challenge’
56 percent of marketers have said that creativity is the most important skill required for navigating uncertain times, with 48.4 percent identifying return on investment (ROI) as the key metric to demonstrate marketing’s impact, while 30 percent noted that their organization doesn’t understand B2B marketing ROI — three of several findings of interest to B2B marketers contained in recently-released survey data. Marketing Week

Beware of sales calls, young B2B buyers say
74 percent of millennials and Gen Z will avoid more sales calls and outreach efforts than older B2B buyers, while 72 percent of overall buyers and prospects have indicated that they plan to consume more digital content along the purchasing journey — two of the statistics of interest to digital marketers found among newly-published report findings. Digital Commerce 360

B2B Marketing News: Top B2B Demand Gen Content Study, LinkedIn’s Record Engagement, Key Social Media Trends, & Google’s My Ad Center

Riding The Razor’s Edge of AI in B2B Marketing

Lane Ellis on Oct 26th, 2022
B2B Marketing, Digital Marketing

Where can artificial intelligence (AI) play a genuinely helpful role in B2B marketing efforts, and when does it go too far and become a creative liability for marketers?

AI has increasingly crept into our daily lives, and B2B marketers are facing these and other new questions, confronted with keeping a healthy balance between some of the efficiency and time-saving gains AI can deliver, and running the risk of implementing too much AI and not enough of the human touch.

AI has continued its inevitable refinements from the first online customer service help chatbots to today’s software that ostensibly writes many forms of text, to the ever-more-impressive AI-generated digital images of programs such as DALL-E.

Riding The Razor’s Edge of AI in B2B Marketing

B2B Content Marketing: Making Small Budgets Do Big Things

Nick Nelson on Oct 24th, 2022
B2B Marketing, Content Marketing

The latest B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends Report found that 67% respondents are being asked to do more with the same resources compared to a year ago.

Many teams will keep being pressed to work under constraints in the coming year as economic uncertainty affects planning and budgets. In the latest CMO Survey, released in September, results showed that marketers “generally expect the growth of their marketing spending to slow or be flat in the coming year,” with waning optimism around the economic outlook likely a central factor.

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The most reliable way to drive marketing results is to (smartly) invest more. This can lead to more ambitious campaigns and more robust promotion, among other things. But when a big budget isn’t available, B2B marketers can still do big things.

B2B Content Marketing: Making Small Budgets Do Big Things

B2B Marketing News: B2B Content Marketing Report, Google’s New Search Essentials, B2B Marketplaces Expand, & Adobe’s New 3D Tools

Lane Ellis on Oct 21st, 2022
Online Marketing News

B2B Demand Gen: Lead Qualifying Teams Are Common at Larger Enterprises
Top performing large organizations typically have a dedicated lead generation qualification team, as 77 percent of enterprise firms with more than five thousand employees report having such a team, compared to 48 percent of those with fewer than five thousand employees — two of several findings of interest to B2B marketers contained in newly-published survey data. MarketingCharts

B2B marketplaces are shaping the future of B2B ecommerce
B2B marketplace sales are expected to reach $130 billion in 2022, representing an increase over 5.3 times that of 2020, while B2B marketplace sales will reach 6.9 percent of all B2B eCommerce sales in 2022, according to recently-released survey findings. Digital Commerce 360

B2B Marketing News: B2B Content Marketing Report, Google’s New Search Essentials, B2B Marketplaces Expand, & Adobe’s New 3D Tools

20 Ways to Build a B2B Marketing Super-Stack of Skills

Lane Ellis on Oct 19th, 2022
B2B Marketing

How can B2B marketers build a super-stack of marketing technology skills to create the most value and efficiency in 2023 and beyond?

Today’s B2B marketers who possess a wide array of marketing technology skills are more valuable to organizations then ever, as brands look both to increase bottom-line efficiency and retain top talent.

Placing more focus on those places in marketing that can drive greater value is needed now more than ever, according to Tina Moffett, principal analyst at Forrester Research.

20 Ways to Build a B2B Marketing Super-Stack of Skills