The ability to implement and execute global growth strategies has become one of the most important jobs of leaders. A common approach is to apply strategies to different geographic regions of the world. Slightly modifying based on assumed cultural aspects of how buyers and customers engage. You know the regions well – Europe, LATM, Asia-Pacific, etc.

Are leaders though living in a world of assumptions? A world of stereotypes about different regions in the world?

I come down on the side of saying yes to these two questions. Saying yes based on my work in the past five years, including the past year of interviewing buyers globally as part of several interesting engagements. Both B2C and B2B types of engagements. Qualitatively interviewing business buyers and consumers.

In these various engagements over the past few years, I interviewed a few hundred business buyers in different parts of the world. I pushed against the assumptions and stereotypes that are common. Discovering that geographic regions do not play as big a role as you might think in how buyers make choices and decisions.

If not by geographic region, then what provides a deeper understanding of buyer choices and decisions? It turns out grasping the unique buyer mindsets that can exist in different parts of regions yield the type of insights that can make a difference. The implications to growth strategies are profound once you go down this path.

For instance, growth planning around global regions can easily lead to one size fits all approaches. I often hear leaders pronounce that “our strategy for Asia-Pacific is…” and “what we do for Europe is this…” when describing their global growths strategies.

What I have learned is this – as we have become more global, the need to understand deeper nuances, insights, and mindsets becomes greater.

What do I mean? It is important for leaders of global growth to gain insights into clusters of mindsets – even down to a country-by-country level. A case in point. In conducting buyer insights research and buyer persona development around global trade, the variety of buyer mindsets towards trade regulations varied significantly within a region. Buyers in France, Denmark, Greece, and Poland had very parochial and protectionist attitudes towards trade regulations. Whereby Germany, Netherland, Belgium, Italy, and Norway displayed more open attitudes.

The implication here is that applying a one-size-fits-all approach to the region of Europe can mean you may be out of alignment with buyer mindsets within different parts of a region.

Translated more simply – no growth will be happening.

The same can apply to consumer mindsets also. In a fascinating engagement this past summer on fan engagement in the music world, the degree of differences in mindsets within Asia-Pacific was downright amazing. Japan stood out as completely different than say Thailand. Japan consumers were more rooted in family history involvement towards music. Whereby Thailand was about setting trends and being a part of the latest trends.

The implication again – if you are in the music industry, the one-size-fits-all approach by region is not going to cut it.

This makes the job of leaders and branding doubly hard. But at the same time doubly more exciting. To accelerate global growth means relying less on assumptions about regions and getting deeper insights into clusters of buyer mindsets. And how these mindsets translate into choices and decisions.

Buyer insights research and buyer persona development help get to the layers of insights needed to understand not only similarities but divergent goals that drive choices and decisions.

Without these critical insights, global growth could be a slow slog.

The post Understanding a Divergent World of Buyer Mindsets and Decisions appeared first on Business2Community.

Every brand has different needs, different strategies, and different tactics, so a one-size-fits-all approach to calculating ROI is overly simplistic (especially if you’re producing omnichannel campaigns). So how do you figure it out for your own organization? You’ve come to the right place. Here, we’ll walk you through the simple steps you can take to calculate the ROI of your b2b marketing—and avoid the most common mistakes we see when it comes to ROI.

What Are the Biggest Barriers to Calculating ROI?

There are a few common ROI problems we encounter with our clients. They mostly fall under three main categories:

• Lack of preparation (e.g., measurement is an afterthought)
• Lack of knowledge (e.g., baseline information, benchmarks, etc.)
• Lack of tools (e.g., no infrastructure setup)

These can all hinder your ability to calculate ROI, but the truth is that there is an even bigger (and more common mistake) we see our clients make—and that is not calculating ROI at all. The good news? If you’re reading this guide, you’re already doing better than a lot of marketers out there.

64% of B2B marketers say their organization’s ability to demonstrate content marketing ROI is average or worse.

—Content Marketing Institute’s 2022 B2B Content Marketing Report

How Do You Measure the ROI of B2B Marketing?

No matter what product or service you sell, the key to calculating ROI successfully is approaching ROI as an integral part of your content strategy—not as an afterthought. That means knowing what/how you’re going to measure, measuring the right things, and using the results to inform your next move. To help you do that, we’ve laid out the same process we use to help our clients calculate ROI—and improve it with every campaign.

1) Set concrete goals.

It may seem obvious, but this is actually one of the biggest mistakes we see in B2B marketing. Without clear goals, the rest of your strategy crumbles. Spend time on goal-setting (and include the right stakeholders in these conversations) to clearly define what you’re trying to achieve and identify the best measurement approach to track your success.

The more clear your goals are, the easier it will be to calculate ROI.

Some things to keep in mind while you’re setting goals:

• Be specific. ”Building brand awareness” sounds like a goal, but it’s actually a very murky idea that is difficult to measure. What does building brand awareness actually look like to you? Website visits? Video views? Ebook downloads? If you want to calculate ROI accurately, you need something concrete to measure. Often, several quantitative goals contribute to a larger qualitative goal (e.g., relationship-building), but it’s the quantitative goals that will help you better calculate ROI.
• Consider the timeframe. ROI does not show up overnight. It probably won’t show up in a few weeks. Marketing ROI is all about the long haul, so think about how that may factor into your goal.

Note: Make sure all stakeholders have signed off on your stated goals. Going forward, you need everyone on the same page to set yourself up for success.

2) Choose the right metrics.

Calculating your ROI is all about accuracy and relevancy. Just because you can measure something—and the numbers may even seem exciting—doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to measure.

For example, while impressions can be a useful metric to show your reach if it’s conversions you’re after, impressions may just be a vanity metric. Sure, it may seem exciting that a million people saw your YouTube thumbnail, but it also means that a million people saw it and scrolled past it.

Remember: The biggest number doesn’t always mean the best results.

Look at your goals, and identify the most relevant metrics to measure them.

3) Set your budget.

Figuring out how much to invest in your B2B marketing is always tricky, but it is usually dictated by your historical data. For this, there are a few numbers you need to know.

Lead Value (LV): How much a lead is historically worth.

LEAD VALUE FORMULA
Average Customer Lifetime Value x Close Rate

Example
$50,000 (ACLV) x .04% (CR) = $2,000 LV

Cost Per Lead (CPL): How much it costs to acquire a lead.

COST PER LEAD FORMULA
Total Marketing Spend / Number of New Leads

Example
$5,000 (TMS) / 10 leads (NL) = $500 CPL

Note: If you’re a brand-new company and you don’t know your CPL, you may want to work backward from your average Click Through Rate (CTL).

CLICK THROUGH RATE FORMULA
Clicks / Impressions

Example
10 (Clicks) / 100 (Impressions) = 0.1% CTR

For every campaign, determine how many leads you want to acquire and then identify your target CPL. This should be lower than your historical CPL. (If you use your current CPL, you won’t technically make a “profit” on any new leads—you’ll just break even.)

Do you have a distribution plan? Determine how you will allocate your budget across channels before you launch any campaigns.

4) Set up your measurement infrastructure.

If you don’t have the tools and infrastructure in place to actually measure the things you want to, no amount of planning or strategizing will help you. Once you know what you plan to measure (and how much you plan to spend), make sure you have the tools set up to actually track it.

• Do you have all of your tracking codes and pixels placed where you need to?
• If you’re using keyword-tracking software, you’ll want to start tracking the keywords before beginning your campaigns. (Some tools don’t pull historical data, so your progress is impossible to measure.)
• Are all of your tools talking to each other? For example, do you have Google Search Console, Google My Business, and Google Analytics? Sometimes each of these requires a separate integration into any other tracking system you might be using.
• Are you using an ESP that allows you to properly track all of the behaviors you want? For example, some email service providers only tell you if a subscriber opened your email. Others tell you if they glanced at it, scrolled through, or thoroughly read it.
• Are you relying on automation for all of your data presentation? If so, you’ll want to spot check that it’s pulling the right numbers into the right places.
• Do you have someone who owns all of the data collection and presentation? (Team infrastructure is important to ensure there aren’t miscommunications or data left uncollected.)

Double-check everything! There is nothing more frustrating than being sabotaged by a broken link.

5) Test, test, test.

It’s very important to develop—and document—hypotheses before launching a campaign. We often think we know how things will perform, but it’s only when we see the plan on paper (and document the results) that we can really learn and improve.

That said, before you sink all your money into one thing, it’s smart to use a portion of your budget for testing. A testing period will help you 1) ensure that things are up and running correctly and 2) show you what is and isn’t working (or what could be working better). This is a surefire way to improve your ROI without wasting a ton of money off the bat.

5) Monitor and report.

While your measurement approach is unique to each campaign, to calculate the success of your B2B marketing in terms of dollars and cents, the formula is simple.

ROI FORMULA
[Return – Investment] / Investment
x 100

Example
Let’s say you spend $5,000 on a campaign that generated 5 leads, and your Average Customer Lifetime Value is $50,000.

$250,000 Return (5 Leads x $50,000) – $5,000 Investment = $245,000
$245,000 (Return – Investment) / $5,000 (Investment) = 49
49 x 100 = 4,900% ROI

Of course, that is your high-level number. You can go even more granular in your calculation. To do that, here are a few calculator tools that may help:

• Hubspot’s ROI calculator
• Grey Metrics ROI calculator
• Hootsuite’s social ROI calculator

What matters most in reporting ROI is not only the number you end up with but the insights you learned. Take the time to dig into the data and process the findings.

• Was your original hypothesis correct?
• What was particularly successful?
• What was notably unsuccessful?

The more you critically analyze your results, the more you can improve next time around.

How to Improve Your ROI

No matter how successful you are in your B2B marketing, there is always room to grow. A few things to keep in mind as you continue to refine your strategy:

• Don’t get tunnel vision. It’s important to start out with a hypothesis, but don’t double-down on the thing you think you want when the data may show something else entirely. For example, you may have wanted a viral hit on YouTube (and failed). But if the data shows that your Instagram story conversion rate was astronomical compared to YouTube, you’ll see that’s where you should put your money next time.
• Expect the unexpected. Many marketers get discouraged if they don’t get the results they were expecting. (Even if the results are good, you can take an ego hit if the results aren’t what you wanted.) Just know it’s all part of the learning process. Be brave and humble enough to tweak, test, and grow.
• Look for missed opportunities. If you’ve tried everything you can think of and you’re still struggling to get the ROI you want, it may be time to go back to basics. Conduct a content audit to assess your own content, as well as your competitors’ content, and identify opportunities to improve, messaging gaps, etc. You may also want to re-map your customer journey to ensure you’re giving people the right messages at the right time.

The post How to Calculate Your B2B Marketing ROI (the Easy Way) appeared first on Business2Community.

As used in this context, a Microcast is a type of podcast with two characteristics that distinguish it from your average podcast: First, it is short in duration — usually between 1 to 3 minutes long (only 14% of podcasts are less than 10 minutes long); and second, it is published more frequently than the average podcast (currently only 7% of podcasts are published daily).

Here are five reasons why a Marketer should publish a microcast.

It’s what listeners want

An important metric to keep in mind is this: 74% of podcast listeners tune in to learn new things, while others listen regularly for entertainment, to keep up to date, to relax, and for inspiration. In other words, three quarters of listener listen mainly not for entertainment but for education. They want to learn. They are willing to listen for 30 minutes, a whole hour, three hours, and put up with the fluff and the commercials, just so that they can pick the occasional new piece of information or two. Imagine if they could dependably do this with a microcast in a minute or two?

It’s easy to create

Unlike podcasts that require time, preparation, aligning schedules, long recording sessions, and post production, a microcast is relatively much easier to create and produce. The key to a successful microcast is planning and aligning the content of the microcast with the content of your other digital channels (Twitter, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, etc.). One easy way to do this is to talk about what you have on the other channels. I am not talking about speaking verbatim tweets and posts, but rather about providing color commentary that only a human person can give. But always make sure that you are providing that nugget of information that the listener is after. Moreover, such linking between the voice of a living human being and your social media activities has the added virtue of driving traffic to your other channels, thus creating a nice synergy between the warm state of the brand — the one that a human being represents with their voice — and its cold state as it exists in social media.

It keeps your brand top of mind

By virtue of being published much more frequently — ideally on a daily basis — than the average podcast, your brand will occupy the privileged position of top of the listener’s mind much more than say a brand that publishes their podcast weekly. If your microcast is providing the listener with information they find useful or interesting, then your brand will hold an even more special place in that listener’s heart. Your brand will become part of the listener’s daily routine, and a Marketer cannot ask for more than making their brand part of someone's daily life, can they?

It’s a way to engage the whole ecosystem

It should come as no surprise that people like to be asked the question: “Tell me what you think?” So why not ask your customers, your prospects, your employees and executives, your partners, your suppliers for what they think? Not only do that all have interesting things to say, but they have things to say from different perspectives. If nothing else, your listener will gain a greater appreciation for who you are as a business and what you do as a company when they are given a sense of just how many people are engaged in making the company deliver its products and services.

It’s good for your SEO

Two minutes of spoken audio is about 200 words of transcribed text. Multiply that by 5 and you have 1,000 words a week available for you to post as a blog post, with some edits here and there as you see fit. And that’s a blog post chock full of content that is directly relevant to what you and your business do and that other people helped you create. And if you cite the contributors who pitched in (as you should), those are people who will spread for you the word about your blog post, your blog, and your business because it is in their own intertest to spread the news. Interesting, original content, along with motivated ambassadors can only be a good thing for your SEO, your website, and your business.

So, in an age when the sonic channel is on the steep ascendant, here's an easy but powerful way to introduce audio into your mix in a way that not only fits well with your other digital activities, but in fact amplifies them and consolidates their effect.

The post Why Launch a Microcast? appeared first on Business2Community.

One of the most interesting – and under-reported findings – were the things high-performing marketers do differently.

Salesforce categorizes “high performers” as respondents who were “completely satisfied with their overall marketing performance and the outcomes of their marketing investment.” This group represents 14% of the survey sample (N = ~1,152).

The other two categories were “moderate-performers” and “underperformers.”

Moderates were defined as those respondents who were “moderately or less satisfied with their overall marketing performance and the outcomes of their marketing investment.” This group represents 72% of the survey sample (N = ~5,923).

Underperformers were “all other marketers.” This group represents 15% of the sample (N= ~1,234).

Here are some of the things high-performers do differently:

1. More likely to lead customer experience (CX).

86% of high performers say their “organization leads customer experience initiatives across the business” [vs. 81% of moderates and 72% of underperformers].

2. More sensitive to customer expectations.

92% of high performers say “customer expectations are changing our digital strategies” [vs. 85% of moderates and 74% of underperformers].

3. Adapt to innovation more easily.

Just 31% of high performers say they “struggle to innovate our marketing technology, tactics, and strategies [vs. 33% of moderates and 48% of underperformers].

4. More likely to personalize messages.

83% of high performers “personalize messages based on e-commerce actions” [vs. 80% of moderates and 75% of underperformers].

5. More likely to partner with IT.

80% of high performers “make technology purchasing decisions with IT [vs. 77% of moderates and 70% of underperformers]. (Psst! Remember this Gartner statistic bandied about?)

6. More sensitive to customers with support tickets.

69% of high performers “suppress marketing to customers with open service cases [vs. 64% of moderates and 58% of underperformers].

7. More likely to use data to drive CX.

47% of high performers “are completely satisfied in their ability to create more relevant experiences with customer data” [vs. 35% of moderates and 8% of underperformers].

8. More likely to measure results as they happen.

71% of high performers “say they can measure campaign performance in real-time” [vs. 67% of moderates and 55% of underperformers].

9. More likely to automate marketing attribution.

67% of high performers “say their measurement and attribution is automated [vs. 65% of moderates and 61% of underperformers].

Subtle Details Matter to High-Performing Marketers

If you’ve noticed, the percentage difference between high performers and moderate performers is modest – but that’s the point. Anyone can slide by as a moderate performer in marketing. The high performers give their profession just a little bit more effort. It’s a subtle difference but perhaps an important one.

It’s rarely one little thing that, in isolation, makes or breaks marketing. Instead doing all the little things, the right way, and consistently over time adds up to a big difference.

This post by Salesforce summarizes the survey findings.

A version of this post was originally published on Sword and the Script.

Image credit: Unsplash and respective study

The post 9 Things High-Performing Marketers Do Differently [Study] appeared first on Business2Community.

If you’re a business owner looking to expand your company, naturally, the next move would be to hire more staff. Unfortunately, anyone in business knows that the cost of hiring a new employee is massive. After all, employee costs include more than just an individual’s salary. Many other factors need to be considered, such as the cost of recruiting and training, employee benefits, office space, and other expenditures. These overheads can pile up.

What can you do if you need more employees but you’re hesitant to hire because of the risks involved? The solution: hire an offshore virtual assistant or VA.

Virtual assistants are independent contractors that provide various administrative, creative, and technical services to businesses. They usually work remotely and, in many cases, from overseas. Using virtual assistants to scale your business is a more practical and cost-effective alternative to getting a local employee to help you boost business productivity.

While expanding a team with virtual assistants is not an entirely new concept, the practice is steadily becoming more popular. Not only did the COVID-19 pandemic force businesses to adopt remote work as part of normal business operating procedures, but the digital age has also made it easy to do a wider range of tasks remotely. The traditional ways of doing business may well be in the past as technological innovations in digital communication and collaboration continue to improve.

Now, you might think that searching for and hiring virtual assistants on your own is the practical next step. But while going the DIY route can save you a few bucks up front, it’ll probably cost you more in the long run. It’s truly ideal to leave the finding, vetting, and hiring of virtual assistants to experienced specialists like virtual staffing agencies. Here’s why.

1. They have access to a large, ready-to-work talent pool.

An established virtual staffing agency already has a big pool of talented virtual assistants who are ready to work for you. This allows you to start onboarding and training your new hire as soon as possible.

Another benefit of working with a virtual staffing agency is that they screen their talents before endorsing them. This means that you don’t have to worry about doing that particular tedious task yourself. Depending on the exact skills you’re looking for, you can rely on an agency to match you with ideal candidates within a few days because they’re already in touch with several VAs.

2. They allow you to hire more quickly.

Related to the point above, a staffing agency can quickly look for a perfect job match from their existing pool to see which virtual assistants are ready to take on a new client. Whether you need temps, part-timers, or full-time workers, the agency can help you sort out the little details quickly so you can go back to doing crucial tasks and decisions for your business.

3. You are assured of quality candidates.

A trustworthy virtual staffing agency vets its applicants prior to endorsing them to a client. This vetting process typically includes background checks and basic skills assessments. An excellent recruitment organization should be meticulous with their vetting process so that they can find only the best candidates for you. Aside from doing background screening for potential VAs, they can also do skills assessments to ensure that the candidates have the right skills and knowledge.

4. You can "try out" employees and change them if you need to.

There are always risks involved when you hire remote workers. Some VAs may not always be the right fit the first time, which is okay! Good staffing agencies will help monitor and oversee the newly hired VAs for you. And if you think that they are not the person for the job, you can ask the agency to pair you with a more suitable candidate.

5. You get time, effort, and financial savings.

If you think that going through a virtual staffing agency is more expensive than doing it yourself, it’s time to reconsider your stance. When hiring a virtual assistant, you must think long-term. The upfront costs you pay staffing agencies are only a fraction of what you would pay for when you consider the following: advertising, pre-employment screening, training, onboarding, mentoring, and performance monitoring. Not only are these financially costly, but they also take a lot of time and effort if you handle these tasks yourself, especially if you have no prior knowledge or experience in recruitment and screening.

Additionally, staffing agencies help buffer or minimize hiring risks. Some businesses hire contractual remote workers to cover a few weeks' or months' worth of work. Since virtual assistants are already skilled or specialize in a certain niche, there would be no need for training to do the tasks right away. Once the job is fulfilled and the contract is over, agencies serve as the middleman to smoothly facilitate the end of the business relationship.

6. They take care of onboarding and payroll.

One of the biggest reasons businesses hire virtual assistants is that they get the assistance they need right away. No matter how experienced a remote worker is, onboarding is a must as no companies or business processes are the same. For organizations that are too busy to onboard new VAs, the staffing agency can take on that role so that the new hire can start doing their tasks smoothly and as soon as possible.

Another advantage of using a virtual staffing agency is that they take care of the remote worker's payroll. Depending on the state or country, there may be things that need to be taken care of right away, such as taxes, compensation, or unemployment benefits. Furthermore, they may also arrange how the VA is paid and ensure that they get paid accurately and on time.

7. It’s easier to get seasonal help.

There are days when work gets overwhelming, even with a full staff of in-office employees. During these busy times, rendering overtime is inevitable as some deliverables and deadlines need to be met. These periods can range from a few days and even stretch to months. When this happens, burnout can be a risk for your staff.

Temporary virtual assistants can help with some of the work to lessen the burden on full-time employees. These remote workers can pick up the pending tasks when the last employee clocks out for the day. Having this arrangement saves on overtime pay as VAs can work on an hourly basis and prevents turnover to a large extent. However, all the work required to find and hire a VA for a temp job is just not something a busy person like you should be doing. This is why it’s better to let an agency provide you with the seasonal help you need.

What do you think about virtual assistants? Would you hire one for your business? Share your thoughts below.

The post 7 Practical Reasons You Should Let Agencies Hire Virtual Assistants for You appeared first on Business2Community.

However, if you are familiar with the Agile principles for your company, it is pretty easy to get started with the Agile release planning for your product. Below are the simple steps involved in creating a successful release plan:

1. Define Your Goal

While creating the release plan, you and your team should identify the final goal to be achieved and ensure how the release will stay aligned with the larger vision of your product.

Ask yourself: Which outcomes are most important in the short and long term? Analyze the product roadmap and guide the overall processes of product development towards your product vision.

Wondering how to define your goals? Well, you have to gather all the perspectives of your products and put your efforts into identifying your priorities for product deployment. Get in touch with your stakeholders and confirm if your vision matches their needs.

2. Review Product Backlogs

Once you set your goal for the release, it’s time to analyze the product backlog and prioritize your team’s work according to your product vision, starting with an MVP(minimum viable product). In this stage, you have to identify the lacking of the product and review the backlogs.

If you are using Scrum, meet your Agile team for product backlog refinement. Make use of Scrum Board by breaking down your expected outcomes into user stories and adding them to your backlog. Don’t waste your time on irrelevant tasks which cannot lead you towards your goal.

Utilize the input from stakeholders and analyze the product priorities to create user stories. Make sure that the top priority features are most viable and need to be released earlier than others.

3. Estimate the Release Plan Meeting

After outlining the product vision and prioritizing the product backlog, you must schedule a sprint meeting with stakeholders and your Agile team to review the proposed release plan and add, remove or modify the further requirements as needed.

The release planning meeting aims to ensure that the product vision parallels the tasks and prioritizes one step towards your goal. It enables you to make sure that everyone on your team is on the same page and is focused on the common goal of the project.

The primary agenda of the meeting will include:

• Review Roadmap

The primary task in the meeting is to review the product vision built during the first step and confirm that everyone understands it.

• Review architecture

It is essential to review the architecture of the product from the stakeholder before it gets released. It is the stage where you can add or delete any new information in the release plan, including dependencies, assumptions, or gaps.

• Review iteration schedule

The iteration schedule determines the work that needs to be included in a particular release. Also, you will discuss how much work will be distributed among the team members and review the schedule.

• Define “Done”

Establish the meaning of “Done” for any release. “Done” usually means that you have finished every task outlined under the user stories and reported the work to the product owner for review.

4. Divide Releases into Multiple Sprints

Sprints are the small accomplishable division of release planning. Based on the team’s velocity towards the project, you can quickly identify the number of sprints required to achieve the product vision.

Ensure that each of these sprints is not overloaded nor deficient with work; it should be balanced. If you overload the sprint with too much work, your team might face the burden of accomplishing it, which may compromise the release’s quality. On the other hand, if you consider too little target in the sprint, your project may take months to finish, and the estimated release date may be delayed.

5. Create Release Sprint

No development is done at this stage of release planning. A release Sprint is dedicated solely for new deliverables. You have to focus on the common task within your backlog for each release sprint, such as testing, user documentation, bug fixing, and much more.

Note that you don’t have to follow this step in every release plan. If your workflow includes specific tasks to be finished before moving the software into production, it is wise to create an additional sprint for completing those extra tasks.

6. Schedule the target date for release

Now it’s time to share your release plan with your team. Setting a target date is the highlight of an effective release plan.

Everyone in your team, including the stakeholders, should have ongoing access to your release plan. As Agile release plans have a remarkable impact on the success of the project, a clear timeline and workflow will help the stakeholders bet the product in the market.

You can use various workspaces such as lucidchart or Jira to understand the Scrum release planning clearly. Team members, managers, and stakeholders can view the project release plans and detailed timeline without anything getting shuffled and lost in the complex process.

7. Improve & Update the Plan Regularly.

Remember that a plan is subject to changes, and therefore, you cannot stick to a rigid plan to follow and get your product developed. Be flexible and revise the plan as needed to ensure that the process runs smoothly and create a high-quality release deployed on time.

Moreover, consider the feedback from team members and stakeholders to make relevant modifications to the plan.

The agile release plan is an art. It is okay if you don’t get it correct on the first go. Just adjust yourself with the release plan and sprint planning with the flow of your work. That’s what Agile is all about, isn’t it?

Originally published here.

Read More:

• Best CRM Software
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The post 7 Steps To Create a Successful Release Plan appeared first on Business2Community.

First announced last year and rolled out in mid-2021, the purpose of this initiative is to provide unified guidance for quality signals that are essential to delivering an exceptional website user experience. Core Web Vitals are a subset of Web Vitals that attempt to quantify key aspects of the user experience and apply that to all web pages. Ranking signals derived from Core Web Vitals will be combined with Google’s existing search signals, including mobile-friendliness, HTTPS-security and intrusive interstitial guidelines, to provide a more holistic picture of page experience.

What Are Google’s Core Web Vitals?

The current metrics of Core Web Vitals focus on three aspects of user experience (UX) —loading, interactivity and visual stability. These aspects of UX are measured using the following three metrics and their thresholds:

1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is a Google user experience measurement of the loading time for the first meaningful content on the visible screen. LCP typically includes the large hero image or video, messaging and/or block of text located within the user viewport (“above the fold” in the browser window) of a web page. This metric is a critical measurement of user experience because it assesses how quickly a web page can be used by a visitor.

According to Google, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of the page first starting to load. Anything less than that threshold is considered a good user experience, as it allows users to access your content quickly and increases the chances of the user staying to interact with your web page. There are several factors that impact LCP load time including image and video size/dimensions, server speed and response time and render-blocking JavaScript and CSS.

2. First Input Delay (FID)

While LCP measures how quickly the content on your webpage loads on the visible screen, First Input Delay (FID) measures your web page’s interactivity and responsiveness while it is loading. According to Google, FID measures the time from when a user first interacts with a web page (e.g., clicks a link or button) to the time when the browser begins to process event handlers in response to that interaction. This is known as input latency and can cause frustration (and a less than stellar user experience) when there is a noticeable delay for users waiting for the website to respond.

To provide good user experience, a webpage should have an FID of 100 milliseconds or less. There are a number of contributing factors to an unacceptable FID score, some of which are beyond your control (such as a user’s device capabilities and internet speed). What you can control is how web developers include the usage of 3^rd-party JavaScript, adding HTML attributes that control how scripts are loaded and by optimizing images.

3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a user-centric metric for measuring the visual stability of a web page, as it helps to quantify how often a visitor experiences unexpected layout shift while a web page is still loading. CLS measures whether elements in a visible viewport change position from one rendered frame to the next. These layout shifts affect the placement of text, images, forms, buttons and other content featured on a web page. CLS reflects the difficulty a user will experience when trying to interact with elements on a web page.

Minimizing CLS is critical because shifting layouts lead to accidental clicks and unintended outcomes, resulting in poor user experience. To provide a quality user experience, web pages should have a CLS score of 0.1 or less. There are several development-related factors that impact CLS including images, ads, embeds and iframes without dimensions, dynamically injected content, improper usage of web fonts and actions waiting for a network response before updating Document Object Model (DOM).

Why Should B2B Marketers Be Concerned About Core Web Vitals?

While B2B marketers have long understood that search engine optimization (SEO) was largely about quality content, and more than just technical wizardry, SEO continues to evolve. For the last several years, Google’s algorithm updates have highlighted that user experience is an increasingly critical factor in page ranking. It’s no longer enough to simply publish quality content and “be the best answer,” B2B marketers must also be concerned with providing exceptional user experience if they want to rank high in search results.

Core Web Vitals point to page experience as a critical component of the user experience and one of the critical page ranking factors. While content still sits at the top of the ranking factors, page experience and overall user experience truly matter. Providing a poor user experience will not only negatively affect website performance, but it will also hinder success in search engine optimization and generation of organic traffic.

How to measure and report Core Web Vitals for your website

Google has committed to providing marketers and web developers the ability to measure Core Web Vitals in all of their popular developer tools. This includes Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights, Chrome DevTools, Search Console, web.dev’s measure tool, the Web Vitals Chrome extension and a new Chrome UX Report API. With Google’s inclusion of Core Web Vitals as a foundation for evaluating page experience, it’s important for marketers to measure these metrics and take appropriate action when necessary.

Read More:

• Top SEO Marketing Tools
• Best SEO Software: Top SEO Tools for Keyword Research Linkbuilding and Competitor Analysis

The post What Are Google’s Core Web Vitals and Why Should B2B Marketers Care? appeared first on Business2Community.

White papers are one of the most powerful forms for B2B content.

In fact, 71% of B2B technology buyers have read at least one white paper within the past 12 months.[1] And B2B marketers stated that white papers drive more leads and revenue than any other type of content.[2]

A professional white paper can help you:

• • Demonstrate that you have strong knowledge of your buyers’ businesses, roles, and industries.
  • Provide customers with insights into their problems and how to solve them.
  • Build a business case for your solutions.
  • Position yourself as an authority in your space.
  • Educate and nurture B2B technology buyers as they move through your sales funnel.

Although white papers can deliver a lot of value, many marketers have a hard time getting these projects off the ground. The first roadblock is picking a topic that will engage your audience.

What Type of White Paper Should You Create?

B2B technology companies typically sell to two audiences—business buyers and technical buyers. These audiences have different priorities and need content that speaks to their unique concerns.

When you plan a white paper, consider your audience and what information they need before they choose your solution. Here are two types of white papers that can move buyers to the next stage in your sales cycle:

Business Case White Paper

A business case white paper delivers a persuasive argument for why readers should choose your product or service. It speaks to business buyers who want to know how your solution will drive results in their organization. Although it focuses on business benefits, the white paper can also include information for technology buyers who want to know how your solution will make life easier for their users and IT team.

A business case white paper answers the following questions:

• • What is going on in your readers’ organizations that makes this topic relevant?
  • What challenges do your readers face, and what are the risks of maintaining the status quo or choosing the wrong solution?
  • Why do they need to change what they are doing now? Why is this urgent?
  • What solution will solve their challenges?
  • What should they consider when purchasing or implementing a solution?
  • How does your specific solution solve their challenges? Mentioning your product by name is optional, depending on where your readers are in their buying journey.
  • What step do you want them to take after they read the white paper? For example, do you want them to watch a demo or check out another piece of content?

Readers in all stages of the sales cycle read business case white papers and share them with other decision makers.

Technical White Paper

This type of white paper introduces readers to a new technology. It speaks to the tech buyer who wants to know how your solution works, how users will benefit from it, and how it will make life easier for their IT team.

A technical white paper is great for readers in the mid-to-late stages of their buying journey, as it provides in-depth information on your technology.

This type of white paper can discuss the following:

• • The challenges your readers face
  • Why their current technology or processes won’t solve their problems
  • The risks of maintaining the status quo or choosing the wrong technology
  • How a new technology can solve their problems
  • How your specific solution works and the benefits of using it
  • Use cases showing how different industries or lines of business can apply your solution
  • Best practices for implementing or getting the most out of your technology
  • Case studies about your successful customers
  • The step you want readers to take after they read the white paper, such as booking a demo or contacting your sales team

So, which type of white paper should you publish?

It depends on your audience and where they are in your sales cycle. If you want to engage early- to middle-stage leads, a business case white paper can educate them without coming across as too salesy.

If your audience is mostly mid- to late-stage leads, they may want to know more about your product or service. A technical white paper can provide them with the in-depth information they need to make a purchasing decision.

Also consider if your readers are business buyers, technical buyers, or a mix of both. This will help you determine if you should focus on business benefits or technical features.

[1] Demand Gen 2018 Content Preferences Survey Report

[2] DemandWave: Via stat cited in Content Types That Drive B2B Leads & Generate Revenue [CHART], 2017

The post The 2 Types of White Papers That Drive B2B Technology Sales appeared first on Business2Community.

Doing the same things consistently in your B2B marketing can produce steady results, but what about trying new things? New channels? New strategies?

Trying new things out in a B2B marketing strategy does come with certain risks, but often, is worth it.

In this post, we take a look at three ways to innovate your B2B marketing, while preserving the results you are already getting.

Do Research

Where do you start when looking to innovate in marketing?

The best place to start is with a bit of research. You likely follow industry publications or thought leaders, either in marketing or your industry, so poke around and see what people are talking about.

Another avenue is to look at your competitors, vendors, and/or clients to see what they are doing. We don’t suggest copying your competitors, but it gets your mind thinking and considering strategies and methods you may not have tried before.

Attend a Conference or Virtual Event

For B2B marketing strategies and ideas, a great place to turn to is an industry conference or a virtual event. Even a webinar that is specific to your industry or to B2B marketing will provide interesting perspectives and/or other avenues you may not have considered.

When looking at potential conferences or events, take a close look at who is hosting the event and who is speaking or presenting at the event. Review the topics to get an idea of how relevant they are to your industry. For example, while Bop Design is a B2B marketing and web design agency, an event focusing primarily on ecommerce marketing won’t be the right fit as we don’t work within the ecommerce space. The same holds true if an event is primarily focused on products if you only offer services and vice versa. Lastly, be sure to see what past attendees say. Is this primarily a networking opportunity, a sales avenue, or a true learning experience?

Most conferences now have a virtual pass or even a pass just for recorded presentations, making them affordable regardless of the budget you have available for professional development.

Talk to an Experienced B2B Agency

Now, this isn’t a shameless plug for our B2B agency. In fact, we often encourage potential clients to speak with other agencies to make sure it’s the right fit. Even within marketing, many agencies specialize in different types of B2B marketing – whether it’s digital, paid advertising, email marketing, inbound marketing, etc. Talking to a handful of agencies provides perspectives and ideas that might be new to you.

B2B marketing agencies are a great resource/partner because they work with a variety of clients and are on top of the latest approaches, ideas, and trends in marketing. They also have good insight into what works and what doesn’t work.

Read More:

• Best CRM Software
• Best Email Marketing Software
• Best SMS Marketing Software

The post 3 Tips to Innovate Your B2B Marketing appeared first on Business2Community.

How B2B Marketers Can Be More Successful in 2022

A little work now saves you a lot of stress later, which is why we always recommend doing a little housekeeping and planning to make sure you start the new year on the right foot. Tackle these to-dos, and you’ll set your team up for success once you get back from your holiday break.

1) Tie up loose ends.

Just because the new year is coming doesn’t mean this one is done yet. As you wind down, now is the perfect time to check in with contacts, re-examine the tools you’re using, clean up your calendar, test for broken things on your site, and do all of those things that have been on your to-do list for weeks or even months (not that we’d know anything about that!).

2) Focus on strategy.

Every successful B2B marketing team puts strategy first. That said, we’re always shocked to find out how few marketers actually have a strategy down on paper.

60% of B2B marketers don’t have a documented content strategy.

—Content Marketing Institute 2022 B2B Content Marketing Report

When you don’t have a strategy guiding you, or have strayed far from your strategy (which admittedly happens), it’s hard to keep yourself accountable, track your success, or identify what needs to change. If you want to outshine your competition in 2022, creating a strong strategy is the way to do it.

3) Revisit your brand story.

Good B2B content marketing tells a consistent brand story—at every stage of the buyer journey. When your messaging is aligned, your content resonates with your audience, and your content ecosystem reinforces that messaging, you can grab the right people’s attention, build stronger relationships, and move them down the path to purchase one piece of content at a time. But you can’t do this if you don’t know who you are or how to communicate who you are through your content.

4) Assess your budget.

Budget can always be a trigger for B2B marketers. We’re still feeling the effects of the pandemic, and many marketers have had to make do with less. Luckily, it seems the majority of marketers are expecting a budget bump in the next year.

66% of marketers expect their budget to increase in 2022.

—Content Marketing Institute 2022 B2B Content Marketing Report

Whether you’re one of the lucky ones getting this bump or not, it’s important to spend your budget wisely, identify ways to get more value out of your spending, and think about how to allocate resources more efficiently.

5) Try something new.

It’s easy to get stuck in your comfort zone, creating the same type of content over and over. That doesn’t mean you should stop doing what works (especially if you’ve found a nice rhythm), but it also doesn’t mean you should be satisfied with the status quo. There are so many unique types of content that can connect with your audience across different platforms. If you’re not experimenting with different formats, you may be missing out on those opportunities. In fact, simply incorporating one or two different formats may give you surprising results.

6) Look for ways to work smarter.

Not everyone is blessed with a bigger budget. In fact, some have faced shrinking budgets year after year.

Over the last year, 67% of B2B content marketers have been asked to do more with the same resources.

—Content Marketing Institute 2022 B2B Content Marketing Report

The key to maximizing your budget, time, and energy is making the content you do create multi-functional. That means spinning additional content out of existing content, bundling content into a single in-depth resource, creating templates, checklists, and other practical supplemental content, etc. This also means using tools to do some of this work for you.

7) Delegate tasks (if you need to).

Whether you have limited people power, knowledge, or resources, sometimes you just can’t do it all yourself. In that case, it’s important to bring in supplemental help to execute your content strategy. That may mean outsourcing a portion of content creation or relying on someone to guide your whole strategy.

50% of content B2B marketers outsource content.

—Content Marketing Institute 2022 B2B Content Marketing Report

We find that the most successful content marketing teams are built around roles vs. job titles, as one person can cover multiple roles—even if you only have a two-person team.

How to Keep Your Team on Track

While there’s always something refreshing about a new year, you might feel that excitement wane a quarter or two in. That’s why it’s important to stay energized, inspired, and up-to-date on the latest trends and best practices.

The post 7 Ways B2B Marketers Can Make 2022 Their Best Year appeared first on Business2Community.

Word-of-mouth referrals can be difficult to generate, capture, and quantify, so perhaps it’s not surprising that most business owners aren’t focused on building up their word-of-mouth revenue streams.

But client referrals are a tremendously powerful source of leads and potential revenue. My partner and I built a successful digital agency exclusively through word-of-mouth referrals for years. And whether you manage a retailer or a service-based business, there are a number of compelling reasons that you should be leveraging referrals to grow your business as well.

1. People Overwhelmingly Trust Word Of Mouth Referrals

According to Nielson, 83% of people trust word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family, while 92% of consumers trust word-of-mouth referrals more than all other forms of advertising.

Plus, data from Survey Monkey shows that consumers are five times more likely to make a big purchase on the basis of a trusted WOM recommendation than a paid ad.

2. They’re Free

John Wannamaker once famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” We’ve all been there. That’s why part of the beauty of WOM referrals is that you won’t spend a dime on them.

3. They Net Better Customers & Clients

In my experience, new clients that come from referrals advance through the sales process faster, have more forgiving negotiations and lean towards greater loyalty because you come recommended. On average, your referred customers will also spend twice as much as your non-referred customers, making them an incredibly desirable source of business from an LTV standpoint.

4. They Reveal The Value-Add Levers That Are Most Important To Your Customers

Over the years, I’ve learned that more than knowledge, more than a privilege, more than even money, people tend to protect their relationships. When a client is willing to talk about your service and refer you out to someone new, that means you’re really doing a great job of serving them.

And whenever you are referred, it’s a great opportunity to reflect on what your clients love so much about working with you. Is it your turnaround time? Your collaborative process? The network of relationships you bring to the engagement?

If you can identify the reasons you’ve been recommended, you can reinvest in those aspects of your practice and improve your service offerings for all of your clients. Improving your service offerings will in turn help you to earn more referrals, which will grow your business and produce more opportunities to impress and improve.

Ultimately, that virtuous cycle is the reason you should treat customer referrals as your number one metric of success. Unlike your conversion rate, your YOY revenue, or any other quantitative KPI, referrals give you a qualitative view of what you’re doing extremely well right now, and help you to chart what you should do next to compound your success.

4 Surefire Tips To Build More Business Through Referrals

By now you get it–referrals are more effective than ads, totally free, yield more valuable clients, and provide you with actionable data that will help you improve your entire organization. But how do you get them?

If you’re in direct-to-consumer retail, establish an online referral program and remarket it to your bottom-of-funnel audience with email, SMS, ads, website modals, and a top nav link. You can build your own referral program from scratch, or enlist a technology partner that specializes in online loyalty programs, like Stamped.io, Yotpo, or ReferralCandy.

If you offer a B2B service like digital marketing, earning referrals from existing clients will require time and finesse, but there are a number of things you can do to maximize your odds of netting more. Check out these 4 surefire tactics that will help you pull in more referral business:

1. Adopt A Human-First Business Philosophy - Business is essentially a humanist enterprise. Transactions are a function of trust, but trust can never be maintained over the long term if you treat people transactionally.

To be worthy of referral, you must understand that your success is fundamentally intertwined with your clients’ success. That means being an honest communicator, taking maximum ownership when things go wrong, and above all, creating a work environment that fosters team success, so that you can deliver that “wow” moment when it counts.

For some great insight into the business-boosting effects of treating your teammates as essential stakeholders, I recommend Setting The Table, by restaurateur Danny Meyer.

2. Over Serve Your Clients - Want to know how CAA came to represent so much of Hollywood’s top talent? By making “above and beyond” part of their everyday practice. Their philosophy is that whenever they bring on a new client, that client is represented by the whole agency.

And CAA makes a habit of sweetening their services with outside-the-box value adds, like supporting the causes that their clients care about. Working with a client’s favorite charitable org isn’t a typical business activity. It’s an activity that makes CAA feel like more than a business.

Take a page from CAA, and adopt a holistic, generous approach to working with clients: Allow your team to over-serve them when necessary. Bring the full range of your interdisciplinary resources to bear on client issues. Anticipate and address their needs before they ask.

By being a true partner to your clients on all levels, you cultivate the kind of appreciation that turns into word-of-mouth referrals down the road.

3. Turn Wins into Action with an NPS Survey - No matter how great your work is, most people won’t formalize their feedback without a nudge. The New Promoter Score or NPS metric can provide both quantitative and qualitative data to help you understand whether you are successfully serving your customers, and how likely they are to refer you out.

There are two kinds of NPS: the transactional NPS, which asks your customers how likely they are to recommend your product or service to a peer, and the relational NPS, which asks your customers how satisfied they are overall with your product or service.

If you run an online retailer, you can implement a transactional NPS in a strategic place, like your post-purchase page or email flow. If you run a service business with a roster of long-term clients, administer a quarterly relational NPS survey to keep a beat on the health of your client relationships.

Because the NPS consists of a single question, you’ll net more participation than you would with a more time-intensive feedback request. Plus, taking steps to improve your NPS score will help you to keep your clients happier and cause them to reflect on your value. And all of that will come into play the next time they’re asked to recommend a business in your niche.

4. Don’t Solicit, Elicit- Generally speaking, it’s not a wise practice to ask for referrals directly. NPS feedback? Yes. Testimonials? Sure–as long as the client is happy. But asking a current client to broker a new relationship on your behalf smacks of desperation, and you’ll quickly alienate your customers by treating them as stepping stones to new prospects.

Still, the reality is that most of your clients are tightly networked with other people from their industries who will need the services that you offer down the road. And when they develop that need, they’ll ask a trusted friend for a recommendation. So how can you make sure that the next time that happens, your name is the one that gets dropped?

The answer is to look for acts of generosity that bring high value to your clients’ lives. These simple acts will help keep your business top of mind when someone asks for a recommendation. There are all kinds of generous acts and low-investment favors, but some of my favorites are: brokering a useful introduction, reaching out with useful insights, or offering free beta access to a new business unit or service.

Overserve your clients by demonstrating that you are thinking of new ways to add value to their business above and beyond your scope of work.

Keep in mind that the key to this approach is to perform favors without expecting a quid pro quo. They’re about building cumulative goodwill and trust, not about cashing in.

The Bottom Line

No, you won’t find accurate attribution statistics for this form of business building. And you probably won’t see immediate results the way you’d expect with a PPC campaign.

But if you’re serious about growing a business that can distinguish itself among a sea of competitors, turn customers into evangelists, and net the kinds of clients you want to work with, you’ll align those goals with your day-to-day by treating client referrals as an essential metric of organizational health.

The post Make Word-of-Mouth Referrals Your Number One Metric of Success appeared first on Business2Community.

The Problem Today

Historically, marketing has largely “owned” content, leaving sales to request it when they need it or go trying to track it down themselves. This is a problem for many reasons, particularly when employees are spending 1.8 hours a day looking for content pieces (according to McKinsey). In an eight-hour workday, that’s almost one-quarter of the day; time that could - and should - be spent elsewhere.

This also leaves marketing and sales in an awkward handoff or even power struggle, one at the mercy of the other and certainly not working in cahoots. So, the answer is clear: marketing and sales must come together in providing content and creating a consistent experience. But to do so, marketing must fuel sales with the right content.

Organize Your Content Library

The crux of the solution really comes down to organization. You have the content, but who knows where it lives or how it’s categorized? Imagine how it feels for a salesperson to go in search of a specific white paper, only to get lost down the rabbit hole of other white papers intended for other buyers at other stages of the buying journey.

To prevent this, and help your sales team find the content they need quickly, organize your content library. Use tags to group content pieces together based on the specific structure that matters most at your organization. For example, you might tag each piece of content with its format, topic, persona, use case, need, industry and buying stage.

Then, when a salesperson goes to pull a particular content piece for a prospect, they can do so in a matter of minutes. Not only do they save time in their own day (and their fellow marketers’), but they also save the prospect time by getting them what they need right now.

Learn & Improve

When we venture out into a new way of doing something, like orchestrating content to fuel our sales team, we’re all bound to make mistakes. But that’s ok. Mistakes can actually be very useful tools; however, only when you use them as a teacher. When you review your mishaps in order to realize what went wrong, you learn something so you can improve next time.

The same applies here. If you don’t notice when a tactic goes south, you’ll never know to try a different tactic. And this is why the right metrics and insights are so important. For example, your sales team should be able to go into your analytics to see what content pieces have worked in a specific stage of the buyer journey before, and then mirror that for a current prospect in the same stage. Having access to marketing metrics and content metrics analytics allows them to identify what’s working from a sales perspective, and then refine, learn and improve from it.

In order to give buyers the information they need to buy, marketing must first give sales teams what they need to share relevant, timely content. Once you have this interplay mastered, you’ll be amazed by just how much time is saved, and how much marketing and sales are able to truly serve buyers - together.

The post How to Fuel Your Sales Teams With Engaging Content Experiences appeared first on Business2Community.

Marketing is complicated. As the new year looms, planning your marketing budget and activities is top of mind for B2B marketers and leaders. When looking at your long-term marketing strategies and long-term marketing goals for the year ahead, there are probably many questions your organization will be looking to answer. Should you invest your resources into improving and optimizing your website? Should it be devoted to increasing your social activity and generating leads? What about expanding your marketing automation efforts or supporting sales and the channel? There are many different areas of marketing where you can dedicate a portion of your marketing plan, but it’s critical to assess which areas need it the most, especially when you add budgeting constraints to the mix.

Building a marketing plan helps your organization meet both marketing and business objectives. Once you define these objectives, make them measurable and attach timelines. As your integrated, multi-channel plan develops, this will make it easy for your organization to see what your long-term marketing goals are, making the collective effort more effective and delivering the best possible results.

Create a Marketing Plan Focused on Key Goals

As B2B marketers, especially in the tech space, it’s important to have a marketing plan that outlines key objectives to meet and tactics to utilize to meet those goals. Everything from content goals, to sales goals and more, having a full view of what is wanted to be achieved in the year can be of great benefit. Why is focusing on key goals so important? Long-term marketing strategies are made for continuous success, year after year, and these key goals can be met with various long-term marketing strategies. Long-term marketing success doesn’t happen overnight, so building these strategy aspects into your marketing plan can go a long way.

How to Set Long-Term Marketing Goals

There are many different frameworks and analysis tactics that organizations can use to set long-term marketing goals. Here are a few that are simple and easy to utilize:

• Base Your Goals on Previously Gathered Data: This tactic is best when looking at social media or your website. These two aspects of B2B marketing have built-in tracking mechanisms such as Google Analytics and the various social media platform analytics tools available. Doing a complete analysis of metrics for your website such as page views per month, bounce rate, page views per session and so much more can help you set long-term marketing goals. For example, you could set a goal that you want to decrease the bounce rate by 4% in 6 months or you could set a goal of gaining 1,000 more page views per month after a search engine optimization (SEO) revamp.
• Create Long-Term Marketing Goals Comparable to Business Goals: Business goals should be supported by marketing goals as marketing activities will be driving a portion of business success. Be clear on what your organizational goals are before setting long-term marketing goals. Marketing activities that do not supplement what your executive team wants to see from your organization as a whole will not be useful in the long run.
• Identify Strengths and Weaknesses: The reality is, we all have strengths and weaknesses when it comes to marketing. It can be a great exercise for any organization to sit down and understand what marketing strengths and weaknesses that you have. Brainstorming how to make your strengths stronger and how to address the weaknesses will build a well-rounded marketing team.

Utilize Long-Term Marketing Strategies

Long-term marketing strategies are focused on building brand awareness that gains momentum as time passes. Utilizing these activities can help your team’s B2B marketing efforts be successful.

• Content Marketing: One of B2B marketers’ favorite tactics to utilize, content marketing acts as your team’s avenue to generate and distribute thought leadership content and more. Consistently producing blogs, articles, eBooks, fact sheets and other content pieces can help establish trust and expertise by those in the industry. Readers will keep coming back to the content they learn something new from. Make your top-of-funnel content focused on education and continue to move prospects through the funnel with more personalized B2B content.
• SEO: SEO is not something you can take on in one week and expect to see instant results. As more and more organizations are vying for spots on page one of search results on Google, making time in your marketing plan dedicated to SEO is a must. Understanding what keywords to optimize your website and content pieces for can help direct content to the audiences that are searching for it. Keyword research should be a core step in this process because if you aren’t optimizing for the correct keywords, your rankings won’t reflect accurately.
• Social Media: As more and more digital content platforms and channels are utilized by teams and individuals; it’s never been more important to utilize social media. In your marketing plan, this should be an activity with a considerable amount of time devoted to it. When thinking of long-term marketing goals around social media, you should create them for both your B2B organization and your B2B executives. B2B executives on social media are crucial for the thought leadership aspect while both can help build brand awareness.

Establish Long-Term Marketing Goals for Your B2B Organization

Smart management of a total marketing mix leads to efficiencies that take the form of various media working together to support and achieve a business and/or marketing goal. First, understand your goals and then work to create a marketing plan filled with long-term marketing strategies.

Read More:

• Best CRM Software
• Best Email Marketing Software
• Top SEO Marketing Tools

The post How to Set Long-Term Marketing Goals for B2B Organizations appeared first on Business2Community.

53% of buyers say it’s important for new and small companies to produce thought leadership if they want buyers to consider working with them.

—Edelman/LinkedIn 2021 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study

Why You Need to Vet Your B2B Marketing Ideas

The content marketing you create matters. In fact, research shows that it can be more impactful than your sales material.

64% of buyers say that an organization’s thought leadership content is a more trustworthy basis for assessing its capabilities and competency than its marketing materials and product sheets.

—Edelman/LinkedIn 2021 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study

This is why it’s so important to come up with content ideas that are exciting, engaging, and unique. This can be a challenge if you’re feeling pressured to keep your content calendar full at all times, but remember it’s quality that ultimately wins over quantity. Taking the time to brainstorm—and refine—your ideas will always result in better, more effective content that is worth everyone’s time.

But how do you come up with those ideas?

5 Questions to Ask When You Brainstorm B2B Marketing Ideas

Having been through a few (OK, thousands) of brainstorms for our B2B clients over the last decade, we know that the strongest content ideas let you demonstrate your expertise while serving your audience’s needs. (BTW, if you don’t know who your audience is, use our personas template to figure it out.)

To help you identify which ideas will help you do that, here are five questions you should ask before greenlighting your next piece of content.

1) Is this interesting?

Content is a great way to differentiate your brand, but it only works if your content actually stands out to your audience. Why is this idea interesting? Would it make them stop scrolling? Would it make them click?

55% buyers say if a piece of thought leadership does not pique their interest within the first minute, they will move on.

—Edelman/LinkedIn 2021 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study

Luckily, you can turn a decent idea into a great idea by identifying the particular hook you want to lead with.

Tip: Think about how to grab your audience’s attention via subject matter, angle, or even your headline.

• Take a provocative or challenging stance.
• Do a deep dive into a dense subject.
• Cover surprising trends or newsworthy topics.

The way you title your piece can also do a lot to pique interest. Try Coschedule’s headline analyzer to craft a headline with an emotional hook.

Example: Zapier piques interest with a controversial stance on a longheld belief, proudly proclaiming that “the customer isn’t always right.” If you work in customer service, that stance alone is enough to make you want to click.

https://twitter.com/zapier/status/1455986900674785287?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

2) Is it valuable?

A salacious headline might be interesting to someone, but what makes them stick around and, ideally, take the next step toward purchase is the value that content provides.

Value comes in all different forms.

• Educational content teaches people something worthwhile.
• Inspirational content makes people feel excited and motivated.
• Entertaining content brings joy or much-needed relief.

Think about what you want people to take away from your content. What will make it worth their time?

71% of decision-makers say that less than half of the thought leadership they consume gives them valuable insights.

—Edelman/LinkedIn 2021 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study

Example: Ahrefs knows exactly what challenges startups face when it comes to growth vs. budget. Creating a handy guide to help startups grow their SEO is super valuable for their audience.

https://twitter.com/ahrefs/status/1459940507124174854?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

3) Is it unique?

Even if you are not one of the top competitors in your field, unique thought leadership can help you win people over.

47% of buyers say thought leadership led them to discover and ultimately purchase from a company that was not considered to be among the leaders in a particular category (i.e., a challenger brand).

—Edelman/LinkedIn 2021 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study

But if you create the same generic, rehashed, unoriginal content as everyone else, it will be hard to stand out. When coming up with ideas, look for ways to add your original spin, perspective, expertise, or insight.

Tip: If you’re looking for more ways to stand out through content, conduct a content audit to see what type of content your competitors are producing. Remember, too, that one of the best ways to stand out is to share your own unique experience, specifically as it relates to your own wins and failures. This makes you more transparent and honest—and helps you empathize with your audience (and vice versa) about the challenges they may be facing.

Example: When we struggled to find brand strategy resources that felt intuitive for our own brand, we decided to create our ultimate guide to create a brand strategy we wished we’d had. Having read just about every other guide on the planet, this was something we felt uniquely qualified to produce. Since publishing, we’ve received a ton of comments, emails, and even two real-life voicemails from readers who say it’s the best guide they’ve come across.

4) Is it credible?

Credibility is the key to build trust with any audience. The more you position yourself as a knowledgeable expert, the more people will view you as a trusted resource they can reliably turn to again and again.

65% of buyers say thought leadership significantly changed the perception of a company, for the better, due to a piece of thought leadership.

—Edelman/LinkedIn 2021 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study

If you’re not sure how to make your content more credible…

• Look at data. Telling data-based stories makes your brand more credible—and it can get you the spotlight you deserve. Dig into your internal data and you may discover surprising insights that can become great original content. Or use these 100+ credible data sources to produce well-researched content that can get you media coverage. (Journalists love data-based content.) If you’re not sure how to use data in your content, see our guide to data storytelling to find out how to extract these stories yourself.
• Partner with a publication. Marketers actually have a unique opportunity to fill in the gaps that traditional outlets do not have the bandwidth (or insights) to cover. Find out how to pitch your ideas to publications to increase your content’s reach.

Example: The LinkedIn/Edleman B2B Thought Leadership Impact Study we’ve been quoting throughout this article is a great example of data storytelling. By conducting their own survey and synthesizing the results, they provide a helpful resource for B2B marketers across all industries.

5) What is the best format for this idea?

If you want people to connect with your content, you need to deliver the right message in the right package (aka the format they want to interact with). However, format is often an afterthought when brands come up with B2B marketing ideas—and brands don’t always accurately assess their ability to create said format. Things like interactives or video can take a larger investment of time, skill, and money, so knowing your capabilities (and limitations) is important to make sure your end result is up to standards.

Example: Instead of creating a PDF checklist or guide on how to calculate payroll, Intuit created an interactive calculator to help businesses calculate their hourly and salaried employee paychecks. This is a handy resource that empowers users to do their job more effectively—and positions Intuit as a go-to resource.

How to Create Better B2B Content

Even if you have the best ideas, if you don’t have the ability to execute them well, they may not get the results you want. To make sure you’re set up for success…

• Assemble the right team.
• Optimize your content creation process.
• Mix it up.
• Get the right eyes on your content.

Read More:

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• Best SEO Software: Top SEO Tools for Keyword Research Linkbuilding and Competitor Analysis
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The post 5 Questions to Help You Choose Your Best B2B Marketing Ideas appeared first on Business2Community.

Visual elements are the first impressions for prospects that engage with your brand online. Designing graphics that draw them in, rather than deter them, are essential for cultivating an effective online presence. For instance, Kimbia, a growing nonprofit fundraising company, refreshed their company image and marketing. By implementing strategic graphic design practices on the Kimbia website, they experienced a 21% increase in traffic and dropped their bounce rate from 65% to 45%.

Why is good graphic design important?

Every part of your graphics should visually communicate your business’ product features, benefits, differentiators and branding. Strategic communication goes beyond the written word–it must be implemented into every part of your online presence. Creating a strong brand identity for online channels with a consistent look and feel results increases brand recognition. If buyers can pick your brand out of a lineup, they are more likely to invest in your products and services.

In addition, with 65% of the population being visual learners, grabbing audiences through eye-catching design is incredibly important. Posts and content that include images have a 650% higher engagement than text-only posts. A well-designed website and portfolio make the online medium easier to navigate and draws the buyer’s eyes to what you want them to see.

Graphic Design Tips

Design for your audience

Different audiences have different tastes—for example, look at the difference between Zoom’s home page and Oracle’s home page. Both are B2B-focused businesses, but because they serve different audience types, everything from their color scheme to the distribution of information is different. Zoom shows their product in action, while Oracle, which has a much more technical product, communicates the benefits of the product before showing how it works. Understanding the industry your business falls into is just as important as the audience you serve. For example, media and public relations companies curate a different look and feel than technology companies.

Simplify your design

No matter how interesting and creative your graphic design on your website is, if a potential lead can’t easily navigate it, your content can have a limited impact. Making graphics, landing pages and emails intuitive and easy to consume help focus attention on the right content with the most important information first. A pitfall that many B2B businesses fall into is presenting too much information at once which can overwhelm audiences and leave them confused and frustrated.

Simplified design also supports stickiness. With less to remember, it’s easier to keep the most important elements top of mind. Focus on the big points—whether it’s the most stunning statistic or the most critical messaging point. Choosing ease of navigation over pleasing design can be a potential tradeoff that will keep your audience from losing interest. While aesthetics is important, it is even more critical that your visitor can accomplish their goals.

Demonstrate your brand’s voice through your art

Use design to also communicate your brand’s personality and position. Your branding should be distinct and recognizable in comparison to the competition. In a world oversaturated with content and digital brands, consistently communicating your value through your design is crucial. For more insight, check out Launch Marketing’s guide to key design elements of corporate branding to understand why consistency matters, and how it can create an accessible look and feel for your brand.

Create brand guidelines to ensure that visuals highlight and emphasize your brand’s voice consistently across all channels and regions. This encourages buyers to associate a certain color pallet and design with your business. Plus, consistent branding across all channels increases revenue by 23%.

Keep in mind the 5 key elements of good design

Balance, alignment, repetition, contrast and hierarchy. These five elements are the recipe for good design and form the building blocks to create eye-catching and pleasing designs. Focus on implementing these key characteristics in your design elements.

Don’t forget the element of emotion

Color psychology is a crucial practice in graphic design and has major effects on how the design impacts your audience. For instance, warm colors evoke feelings of passion, while blue represents reliability and green has a more calming effect. Think about what your colors are trying to convey about your company and make sure those colors are noted in your brand identity guidelines. Any graphics, or content that includes imagery, should include these colors to effectively communicate your brand consistently.

Implement buyer-centric design

Lastly, ask yourself: What are the needs of your buyers and how can you fulfill them through design? Designs that have the buyer in mind at all times are often the most successful. Strategic communication through design must connect with your audience. For example, if your buyers commonly access your website on a mobile device, ensure that your landing pages are polished and optimized for mobile. Catering to buyer behaviors like this can give your organization a competitive edge.

Read more:

• When You Emphasize Everything, You Emphasize Nothing

• 10 Graphic Design Rules You Should Never Break

The post 6 Tips to Create Effective Graphic Design For Your B2B Company appeared first on Business2Community.

Generating first-party leads at the local level allows marketers to circumvent these challenges and is a competitive advantage brands can use to build customer relationships. Data collection turns into a shared effort, creating a cycle where local retailers receive new opportunities to engage with leads and funnel additional information to the brand for even more targeted activities. This cycle grows a business as it spins faster and faster, maximizing customer lifetime value and sales.

When data connections between brands and their local dealer network are strong, brands have new capabilities to test lead forms, automate lead distribution, and learn what local messages and promotions are most likely to convert. Brands can also integrate local leads into their customer relationship management (CRM) solution for drip campaigns, nurturing leads on behalf of their local dealer network.

With so many benefits for brand marketers to prioritize local lead data collection, the next question becomes how. There are a few critical actions brands can take to empower their dealers.

1. Put the "local" in local advertising

Advertising is a crucial tool in reaching customers where they are. Because it can be deployed against a hyper-targeted audience, it's an excellent way to bring in high-value first-party leads.

Digital ads make it easy to qualify leads through custom fields where data is synced directly to a brand's CRM. For example, brands can run a lead ad through their local dealer to book an appointment, driving more foot traffic to the brick and mortar store while growing their lead data. Using location-specific content strategies, brands can also use ads to direct traffic to landing pages that correspond to a specific location. Brands can then allocate these local leads to their dealers.

2. Engage customers at super speed

In today's world, speed is everything, and potential sales leads can evaporate in the blink of an eye. If a dealer reaches out within five minutes versus 30 minutes, the odds of connecting live with a lead improves 100 fold. And the chances of qualifying a lead contacted within five minutes jump by 21 times compared to 30 minutes.

Brands should consider mobile technology to allow local dealers to connect with leads at lightning speed and track the dates, times, and efficacy of outreach efforts on the go. For instance, dealers can be instantly notified of new leads via SMS to their mobile devices. This can be a big help -- and a mutually beneficial solution -- for a service professional not typically bound to a desk and computer all day.

3. Clear the path to conversion

Incomplete information on a website, lack of a clear next step, and buried information can all slow customers down while on the path to purchase. Shoppers will abandon the site if they can't get the information they need quickly and easily -- and they may not come back.

Make it easy for shoppers to learn more about a product online and in person while providing a clear path to conversion. Set the website and campaign landing pages up to have simple forms that make it easy for a shopper to request a quote or schedule a demo. Loop in dealers to make the calls -- plus having a local point of contact builds a more personal relationship with the customer.

And remember that conversions can happen in-store or online. When the customer is at the store, they are likely using their phones to confirm product details and compare prices. Take advantage of the opportunity with a limited-time coupon or in-store promotion in exchange for contact information.

4. Build long-term relationships

One way brands have sought to differentiate themselves from competitors is through providing memorable customer experiences. Digital is an excellent tool for delivering those experiences. Follow-up can include text-messaged coupons, emails marking their birthday, or maintenance instructions to ensure customers are getting the most out of their purchase. These little things keep a brand on a customer's mind and let them know they're on yours.

There are so many benefits to going local with first-party lead collection. As more data is collected, brands can better understand their customers and create opportunities for engagement and conversion. But for brands to reap the most success, they must remember to bring local dealers in on the process. Make it possible for dealers to participate in customer engagement to close the gap on lead engagement, data visibility, and sales funnel performance, and increase customer lifetime value while you're at it.

Read More:

• Best CRM Software
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The post Think Local to Generate First-Party Leads appeared first on Business2Community.

Undoubtedly, social media has become a necessary marketing tool for those wanting to amplify their brand in the saturated online market, with 92 per cent of marketers stating that social media has helped to increase exposure. However, not all social media channels are built with the same purpose in mind, and each platform serves a unique purpose for businesses.

Here, we explore the social media channels that have dominated in 2021, and consider the tactics SMEs can use on each channel to ensure they’re using social media to its full potential.

Define the goals and objectives

Early in the campaign’s development process, you must consider what your business wants to achieve by leveraging social media marketing. From building brand awareness to reaching prospective customers and driving new leads, or all of the above, when it comes to choosing a social media platform and judging the success of a social campaign, it’s important that businesses know their objectives.

After deciding your goals, the next step is to determine how you’ll track progress. The best way to do this is to use the social media metrics that match your objectives. Common metrics include organic reach rate, click-through rate, video view rate, engagement rate and growth rate. Below, we break down the five social media metrics that matter when measuring the success of your digital campaigns.

• Organic reach rate
  

Organic reach rate measures the number of unique accounts that have seen your social media post. Excluding reach that is the result of paid promotion, organic reach provides insight into how your business is connecting with new customers. To increase organic reach rate, the first step is to narrow your focus. Hone in on a couple of social platforms, then work to understand what content performs best on your platform of choice.

The 2021 Social Media Benchmark Report from Metigy and Social Status found that leveraging Instagram’s features resulted in the highest performing organic reach rate at an average of 10.79 per cent. The results show that knowing how to use the platform effectively provides vital insight to help you craft a digital strategy that generates more organic reach.

• Click-through rate

Click-through rate (CTR) identifies the ratio of clicks a link gets against the number of impressions. Popular for electronic direct mail (EDM), this metric is used on social media to create content directing users to a website or link.

Although surprising to some, LinkedIn generates strong results for businesses in this area. Our research found that the platform delivered the highest CTR across social media platforms at an average of 4.30 per cent, compared to only 0.38 per cent on Facebook.

• Video view rate

Video view rate (VVR) counts the number of people who viewed your video content. VVR is most effective on Facebook, boasting a whopping 45.46 per cent view rate on average. Given these stats, it’s clear that video content is a useful tool, but how can you use it to your advantage and grow your VVR?

Ensuring you have clear and concise captions and an engaging thumbnail will direct attention to the video. Additionally, using subtitles can also help boost your watch rate, and creating a call to action will encourage viewers to engage more thoroughly with your content.

• Engagement rate (public and private)

Engagement rate is the metric used to measure how involved your audience is with your content. Public engagement measures the engagement from your followers (likes or comments) divided by your followers. Private engagement, on the other hand, is the number of engagements divided by the overall reach. Typically, private is used to track your own success over time.

This metric is particularly useful if you’re looking to expand your exposure, with YouTube leading the pack with the highest public engagement rates, averaging 0.66 per cent. Instagram takes the top spot for private engagement rates though, at an average of 7.95 per cent.

High engagement rates prove your content is valuable to your followers and helps boost your position in the almighty algorithm. Additionally, engaging your audience is a surefire way to build relationships and handle customer issues in a timely manner.

• Growth rate

Growth rate refers to how quickly your social profiles are growing, typically measured at the beginning and end of every month. As digital networking gains in popularity, we’re seeing LinkedIn again tops the charts for the fastest growth rate at 2.82 per cent.

Growth rate is typically the most understood of all the metrics, and is a sign of how well all your other metrics are performing. Creating unique content, posting at the right times, using hashtags and engaging with followers are all tactics that will help to improve your growth rate.

As more consumers shift online and social media continues to boom, businesses must consider tactics to optimize social media results. In addition to measuring metrics, businesses are turning to AI-supported digital marketing tools to help build data-informed strategies and boost productivity. With these strategies, businesses can cut through the noise to successfully reach their desired audiences and ultimately, generate stronger results.

Read More:

• Best CRM Software
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The post Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram? Why Social Media Success Depends On Your Objectives appeared first on Business2Community.

The art of narrowing your target down to high-worth accounts and the likeliest to convert, and then sending personalized marketing messages to key decision-makers in these accounts is what is known as account-based marketing, ABM for short.

Unlike the traditional B2B marketing funnel, ABM flips both the funnel and the agenda. Instead of generating leads and nurturing them to conversion, here you identify the leads and nurture them to loyal customers.

Source

What’s involved in account-based marketing?

Simply the following steps:

• Select high-value accounts
• Understand their pain points
• Assess how you can help them achieve their goals
• Map and profile decision-makers
• Create made-to-order content that addresses their problems
• Identify the best channels to reach them
• Deliver personalized, targeted marketing campaigns
• Measure success
• Repeat

The focus of this piece is to show you how content can be used in account-based marketing, and not just page views and traffic.

Why use content for ABM?

It’s best for B2B who use an inbound marketing approach

As a B2B brand, you pay more for content than a B2C brand does.

The paradox, however, is that the B2B industry is characterized by low search volumes and a smaller audience. This even pales in comparison to what you see when you check the conversion rates for the B2B industry.

The best way to guarantee you’ll get value for your money is to use account-based marketing as it lets you focus on deals that are worth pursuing.

Measuring the impact of content on revenue

All these years, content has been used to generate leads, page views, traffic, etc. But every marketer who’s worth his/her weight in gold knows all these are vanity metrics that can be achieved by any basic online marketer.

When a business hires a marketer, they don’t do it for traffic and page views, what they have in mind is revenue, and only the marketer that can bring that will enjoy more patronage.

Using content for account-based marketing helps you keep track of what’s bringing in revenue and put market spendings in perspective before the stakeholders.

This goes beyond just ranking content on Google and seeing leads, not knowing whether they close deals or not.

So, how’s it done?

Here are the steps to create great account-based marketing content

Use analytics to gain insights

When it comes to ABM, the marketing and sales department work together to come up with a strategy, but given the experience of sales in dealing with customers directly, sales often have more say.

This doesn’t mean marketing should fold its arms.

What enables ABM is the ability to identify and target high-worth accounts with not just relevant but personalized marketing messages.

If the sales department contributes from experience, marketing can also make an input through research using cohort analysis under Google Analytics.

What does cohort analysis mean?

Cohort analysis is a behavioral analysis that shows you what a subset of your user base is doing in your app/website.

There are two types of cohort analysis:

Acquisition cohort: this segments your users based on the time they joined your product.

Behavioral cohort: this classifies your users based on what they do while using your product.

It is true that SaaS brands use cohort analysis majorly to arrest churn, but behavioral analysis serves our purpose here because it does show through what channels a cohort was acquired.

What you should do with this data is to identify what has worked for high-value accounts among your existing customers in the past and what aspect of your apps they use the most.

This is going to help in preparing your personalized messages for them.

Speak to your sales team

Marketers can envision and map out user touchpoints while preparing the sales funnel, but no one has more hands-on knowledge of what users really need like the sales team.

Part of what causes problems in generating revenues for most B2B companies is the disconnect between the two departments.

And this occurred to me sometime last year when I was brought into a B2B company to cross-sell some of their customers.

Using email marketing techniques, I wrote to all the contacts given to me, but the responses were as shocking as they were heartbreaking.

It turns out the company had some unresolved issues with these clients, and only the CEO and the sales team were aware of this.

My previous conversation with the sales team only scratched the surface. And this was an error. In fact, it wasn’t everyone on that email list handed over to me that I should have sent a campaign.

In identifying the right account to target, your sales team has useful insights on who they are, what their problems are, and how they are best reached. But most importantly, what kind of content should you create for them.

Since they are the ones that normally have one-on-one discussions with users, ask them what content they need to to do their work better.

Use the information to identify and serve your ideal target accounts

Using cohort analysis and insights from the sales team, now you have answers to the four most important questions of account-based marketing.

1. Who are the high-value accounts you can target?
2. What are their pain points?
3. Who are the decision-makers?
4. What’s the best way to reach them?

If you have the right answer to all these questions, you are halfway through creating ABM content that turns to revenue.

Create landing pages matched to this campaign

If you have been paying attention, you know by now that account-based marketing success rests entirely on how well you are able to personalize the targets’ experience, and we have seen all sorts of examples for this.

Of course, it is worthy of notice that most marketing campaigns require landing pages of their own, ABM campaign most of all.

From the extreme to the subtle, businesses have tried to win the race of who is best in building an ABM landing page.

This example from Optimizely strikes me the most:

I get it; it’s neither easy nor cheap to get to this level of personalization, but try and make a different landing page for different ABM content campaigns you execute as this increases your chances of success.

Now compare this to what's on the homepage of Globex Writing Services which has no specific audience or personalization aside from any person in need of any kind of writing:

If you look throughout the page, you wouldn’t see anything about you, their potential client, but about the company. It would appear like they don’t even know who you are.

Now this is not to say what’s on that page doesn’t work for them, but between the two, which one would have caught your attention the most?

Use the insights to develop a custom content

Custom content, as the name implies, is the kind of content you create for a specific audience.

If you have been paying attention, you know by now that account-based marketing relies heavily on a very simple fundamental: personalization of experience.

All the steps recommended above are therefore tailored towards being able to take this last step successfully.

You know if this was in lead generation or demand generation, we’d say: conduct keyword research. But this is a different marketing strategy.

You can determine how custom you want your content to be by looking at all the insights you have gathered from the steps recommended earlier as well as knowing who the decision-makers are and what content serves them best.

Take a look at this online coding courses piece from BrainStation:

It’s not the number of traffic they get to the page that matters as it is the target audience: people who don’t have enough time to learn how to code full-time but still need to learn to code anyway.

While this is a B2C content, it stands in for a witty example of good personalization -- a piece of content that isn’t speaking to anyone but a well-defined set of audience.

Here is another example from Gong targeting female leaders in sales:

Although Gong is in the B2B industry, this personalization isn’t as specific as the first one, but it’s a good example of personalization nonetheless.

Who is the audience here? Women in sales.

The idea is that the pieces here were not created just out of keyword research, they were tailor-made to speak to a certain target market. In account-based marketing, you approach each account as if they were an individual market.

That’s what this is all about.

Conclusion

There is no denying the power of account-based marketing in saving you money and winning more sales, what’s not getting enough attention is the adoption of content marketing as an ABM strategy.

I described how you can do that here by taking from the experience of those who are taking advantage of this simple approach.

The post How to Create Account-Based Marketing Content for More Sales appeared first on Business2Community.

The sales cycle lasted two days. He wasn’t in our system and didn’t fill out a form.

I’m not sure how he found our website and my post. (I probably should have asked.)

Had I not been regularly creating thought-leadership content, this opportunity would never have materialized. The CEO wasn’t looking for a training solution, and there’s no way an advertisement or product content would have caught his attention.

The problem with the product-centric content that lives behind a landing page with the intention of capturing someone’s contact information (lead generation) is that it’s out of sync with how today’s buyer wants to research.

It’s too early in that process when they’re “just looking” and don’t want emails and phone calls from the vendor’s sales reps.

To succeed in B2B, you need to focus on the long-term by engaging, educating, and being active in the ecosystem. This approach will create demand over time and help you spend less money while attracting higher quality inbound leads that are better positioned against your competitors.

Thought-leadership content should be created for engagement, not lead capture—but its measurement is much more nebulous.

That creates a dilemma for CMOs whose leaders are accustomed to the past measurability of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) as a predictor of buyer intent and are unwilling to fund what they deem unmeasurable.

Therefore, moving the organization toward a more demand-centric model requires satisfying sales’ short-term appetite for buyer intent identification while simultaneously developing the long-term thought-leadership content required to penetrate the dark funnel.

Wait, what is the dark funnel?

It’s a given that buyers use the internet to research products and services—but they’re doing it differently today than they were a decade ago.

Back then, searches predominantly started with Google, which is why most content marketing strategies for lead generation focused on optimizing buyer intent keywords and phrases.

SEO strategies worked because the buyer would find the content there, leading them to websites where the anonymous traffic could be converted by downloading a white paper that promised to give them the solution. That lead was then handed to sales to pursue, nurture, and book appointments.

It worked so well that the majority of B2B companies jumped on the bandwagon. Today, because buyers are bombarded with content and sales emails, they’ve largely tuned out. Now they start searches by asking peers, whether that’s a direct message or participation in a network.

Latané Conant, chief market officer for 6Sense.com, describes this “dark funnel” as “all of the ideal customers that are looking for a solution like yours, are potentially buying solutions like yours, and you cannot reach them. You're not getting them to your website, you're not seeing their patterns, you're not engaging with that buying team.”

The result is that your ideal customers are in-market for what you do, and you have no idea.

You can’t sell your way to growth anymore

Peter Drucker said in Management (1973): "There will always, one can assume, be a need for some selling. But the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself."

He expanded on this by saying, "Ideally, marketing should result in a customer who is ready to buy. All that should be needed then is to make the product or service available, i.e., logistics rather than salesmanship, and statistical distribution rather than promotion.”

That’s where I see the progressive definitions of an MQL going today—only counting the sales-ready hand-raisers—at which point there should be no reason to insert a sales development representative (SDR) in the middle to qualify and pass to an account executive.

(Which is why many companies are moving SDRs to work under marketing where they aren’t incentivized to set appointments and are instead tasked to figure out how to advance the individual’s buyer journey.)

That’s a hard pill to swallow for many who have invested heavily in the predictable revenue model, so they continue to promote product-oriented content to generate leads and let their SDRs chase them down by sending a bunch of emails, calling, and berating them into taking a meeting.

Too many times they find that when those meetings happen, there’s no budget, authority, need, or timeline (BANT). They may be interested in the product, but there’s no opportunity and it falls flat.

It's hard to make that model work at scale anymore because it’s out of sync with how the buyer wants to buy. They want to consume information anonymously and reach out for a demo or to talk to sales when they’re ready.

Vanquish (most of) your landing pages

The movement is to create a better buying experience, and that means getting rid of most of your landing pages. They cause friction, increase bounce rates, and most importantly, create a poor experience for the buyer.

If you’ve ever hesitated to download a “free” white paper because you didn’t want to be added to a list, you know what I’m talking about.

The drive for MQL conversion is also symptomatic of a lead generation culture where the role of marketing is viewed only as sales enablement instead of as a strategic driver of the business.

Casey Carey, CMO of Kazoo HR, says, “It makes me sad when I see that marketing is viewed as a service organization to the company, in that they're doing one-sheeters for sales, or they're doing a webinar, or the CEO wants a press release. [And you’re left with a list] of tactics that just come out of nowhere. I think sometimes we fall into this trap of wanting to please everyone and do all the things. But it’s a recipe for failure.”

Not that providing leads to sales isn’t an important marketing function. But you need to get in sync with sales to define what the MQL handoff should look like so there’s zero hesitation in pursuing it. (And so they can’t blame marketing for low quality leads.)

Carey’s number one objective for content is engagement—not lead generation.

He says they’ve stopped looking at whether a singular piece of content created any MQLs, and instead focus on whether it’s generating engagement within their target audience.

“One of the things we did was look at our MQL quality,” says Carey. “We recently received an inbound email that started, ‘We've done an exhaustive review. Kazoo is in the top three. We would like to schedule a demo, and please cover these ten points.’”

Ken Lempit, president of demand generation agency Austin Lawrence Group, adds, “If you want people to consume your content, consider you, and believe it’s potentially a good fit for their business requirements, you need to make their education process as friction-free as possible. And trust me, sales will quickly pursue any leads that match their ideal client profile and are motivated to talk to them over your recent white paper downloads business cards dropped in a fishbowl at a trade show.”

Granted, this progressive MQL definition will result in lower quantities, but you should be able to demonstrate higher close rates and decreased customer acquisition costs. And when you focus on education over lead generation, it frees up marketers to focus on demand generation and eliminates the unnecessary fakery in data analysis.

In other words: Marketing—inclusive of all four Ps in the mix (product, place, price, and promotion).

Jane, get me off this crazy thing!

The writing has been on the wall for at least five years as the whole lead-to-conversion process has broken down. It’s led to bad marketing practices, high turnover in sales, and missed quota attainment.

While the old metrics for lead generation may still look good in the boardroom, the aftereffects will not. It’s setting up either sales or marketing for failure, depending on who does a better job at deflecting blame.

Overall, it creates a culture of short-termism that won’t achieve long-term growth objectives, nor will it position marketing as a strategic driver of the business.

If you’re stuck on the lead gen hamster wheel and want to change the dynamic, you must first prove that no sales process fits in the nice, linear box we think it should.

Marketing in this new world should first help sales identify those opportunities using available signals that indicate buyer intent as quickly as possible and concentrate on the long-term strategy that creates customers and brings them to the table ready to buy.

There’s a lot of waste that’s inherent in the current system, and if you look at the truth behind the numbers, it should be easy to find.

Asking every customer and prospect where they found you is a good start. And second is dissecting all closed won deals to determine their genesis.

Don’t rely on your CRM or other software attribution that indicates where the lead came from. Even when it says it from a direct search, it probably came from someone recommending they look, at which point the prospect went to Google and searched the name of the company directly.

Make sure you’re in complete alignment with sales as to what a good lead looks like and when the handoff should take place.

Realize that the closer to sales-ready you set that MQL definition, the fewer leads will be generated.

Make sure everyone understands that while the quantity will be much lower, the quality will be much higher. If you’ve done the research, it should be easy to demonstrate that the lead-to-close ratio on white paper downloads and advertising clicks in no way justifies the cost of customer acquisition associated with pursuing them.

Create marketing initiatives like podcasts, videos, articles, publications, etc. that require you to talk to buyers, thought leaders, subject matter experts, analysts, and prospects. That will allow you to evolve alongside the buyer and discover what they truly care about so you can create customers and not just respond to existing demand.

And when someone is ready for a demo or to talk to sales, hand them off to someone who’s qualified to answer their questions, not an SDR who’s going to ask BANT questions to pass off to an AE.

Let’s face it—marketing and sales have ridden the gravy train for too long.

It’s past time to use better marketing and sales practices that engage buyers on their terms instead of converting them into our sales funnel, which is what we should have been doing all along.

The post Why Lead Gen Is No Longer a Strategy appeared first on Business2Community.

However, according to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2021 Technology Content Marketing Report, marketers cite “finding partners with adequate topic expertise” as their number one problem with outsourcing work.

This lack of expertise isn’t just frustrating; it’s burdensome to your brand. The point of outsourcing is to take things off your plate, not take more time to teach people how to take those things off your plate. We know how difficult this can be, which is why it’s so important to find the right B2B marketing agency for your brand. But with so many agencies out there, how do you find one with the expertise you need and the ability to execute?

5 Tips to Find the Right B2B Marketing Agency

We know a little something about brand-agency dynamics, so we’re here to help both sides find the right partnership. If you’ve had trouble finding the right B2B agency to help with your marketing, we hope these tips will make the search that much easier.

1) Know what you need help with.

This may sound obvious, but you need to be specific about what you’re struggling with when you approach an agency. If you don’t know what type of content you’re going to create, it will be hard for an agency to determine whether or not they have the skills to help you.

That doesn’t mean you need to have a full content strategy fleshed out. (In fact, that may be something you want a B2B marketing agency to help you with.) But you should know your audience and the type of content you’re looking to serve them.

Tip: It’s helpful to have your brand messaging well defined, including your messaging pillars. If you’re selling yourself as the best IT security software in the market, knowing your key stories will make it easier to brainstorm ideas and communicate what type of content you’re looking to create.

2) Ask for recommendations within your industry.

Word of mouth is always a great way to find an agency, and it’s especially helpful when you hear it from an industry insider. Ask colleagues in your industry what agencies they’ve worked with (and, most importantly, which ones were pleasant to work with). Or look at work in the wild that you admire. You can often track down the agency that did it.

Tip: Just because an agency works in your industry doesn’t mean their work is particularly successful. Comb their website for case studies and results. (If an agency doesn’t have any public-facing work to share, that’s a red flag.) You should also take a look at their blog or contributions to industry publications. Good agencies regularly share their expertise.

3) Ask an agency for specific examples.

Don’t be shy about your needs. An agency can’t showcase every single piece of work they’ve ever done on their site, but they have a large archive of work that demonstrates their expertise.

Even if they don’t have exactly what you’re looking for (say, a whitepaper about a very specific subject in your exact field), if they have produced a large report that is similar to what you’re looking for, that shows evidence of their ability to execute and synthesize the information at hand.

Tip: If there’s something particular you’re looking to create, ask for examples of similar work.

4) Ask about their network.

You may not be able to find a boutique B2B agency that specializes in your exact product/service/industry (e.g., provides IT solutions to cheetahs with computers). Don’t despair. Even when you find an agency that does specialize in your exact niche in your exact industry, your account producer won’t likely be an expert in IT solutions for cheetahs. Instead, what you’re getting when you work with them is their access to an established network of experts.

If they don’t have the experts in-house, the right agency will know where to get them (and probably already have an established relationship with them). Note: If you’re looking to produce a large volume of content, working with a larger network of people isn’t just smart; it’s mandatory to scale up.

Tip: Ask about their content creators, who they work with, and what their qualifications are.

5) Take your time.

It can be frustrating to hunt for the right agency, but what you want is more than expertise. You need to have a strong rapport. Take time to interview and vet various agencies. Remember: You’ll waste more time and money if you need to change agencies again, so take the time to do your due diligence.

How to Improve your B2B Marketing

Whether or not you outsource your work, there are plenty of ways to strengthen your marketing.

• Follow best practices. Try these tips to create better B2B content.
• Experiment with different formats. Whether it’s brand video or infographics, mix it up and see what happens.
• Optimize your content creation process. Even if an agency is helping you create content, it’s always smart to strengthen your internal process. Find out how to master content creation to create better content at scale.

The post 5 Tips to Find a B2B Marketing Agency With the Right Expertise appeared first on Business2Community.

If I were a CMO of a B2B company in its growth stage (after Series A), this is what I’d focus on in 2022:

1. Demand gen & brand marketing in the dark funnel

How do you generate demand and build your brand? The simple answer is creating and distributing different types of content on organic and paid social.

But if you want to go deeper, your content strategy needs to be aligned with where your potential customers hang out online and how they learn about and buy products, so conduct customer research.

You'll know it's working when you generate inbound opportunities (mostly through direct traffic) that translate into marketing-sourced SQOs and revenue. And make sure you optimize for these metrics.

Simply put, adopt a buyer-centric mindset.

2. Community-led growth

Create or engage with communities where your prospects and customers easily collaborate, support one another, and network.

As such, you have to act as their peer, and depending on the community, you want to involve the right person (SME) from your company (and not a marketing person by default).

Tapping into communities can help you generate demand at a low CAC.

For example, Slack facilitates third-party communities, like Partnership Leaders and Demand Curve, which all bring in new users.

3. Word of mouth marketing

Word of mouth is the best marketing you can have because this is exactly how we buy.

B2B buyers make buying decisions by listening to colleagues/friends they trust, and learning on communities, slack channels, social platforms, groups, and more.

Word of mouth can be driven by points 1 & 2 listed above, but also by influencer marketing, events, and customer evangelism programs.

4. Testing new & future growth channels

Your marketing should be proactive, not reactive. So, in parallel with the marketing efforts I suggest here, you should always be testing new avenues for growth to stay ahead of the curve, even if those involve a low budget.

For example, TikTok is beginning to gain traction with B2B buyers, so I’d lay the groundwork to figure out how to create content that resonates there. By planning ahead, you'll know what to do when the time comes, giving you a big competitive advantage.

That's it. What would you add?

The post What CMOs of B2Bs in Growth Stages Should Focus on in 2022 appeared first on Business2Community.

A standard marketing mix includes several key elements that fall into either inbound or outbound marketing categories. However, for B2B leaders, the mix of content for thought leadership is somewhat different. Since thought leadership focuses on building credibility and expertise, some common marketing strategies work better than others.

No matter what kind of thought leadership you create, it's harder than ever to make it stand out. With more people using digital channels to share content, many organizations and individuals are filling these channels with regular posts. What will it take for yours to be noticed? Explore our strategies in this blog.

Being a B2B Thought Leader

Many B2B leaders are very knowledgeable about several topics, so creating and distributing thought leadership content is incredibly beneficial. When it comes to B2B thought leadership, it is essential to understand what content pieces are more effective than others in conveying industry and topic expertise. One of the main goals is to establish credibility and act as a thought leader in the space. But, most importantly, create content that is relevant and worthwhile to the audiences that are trying to be reached. Anyone can create a white paper, but if the information is not accurate or not well presented, audiences members consuming the content will not be impressed and most likely not deem you a credible source or thought leader.

Ideas for Thought Leadership Content

1. White papers: Similar to a research report, white papers are a complete guide to a complex topic or focus area. A white paper should deliver research- and data-backed content to audiences so they can then utilize that information in their organization. Because white papers tend to be longer than a blog or article, the information inside includes many actionable tips, best practices and useful strategies to either overcome the challenge or execute a component of marketing in the most effective way possible.
2. Videos: Videos have become increasingly popular in the new digital age, so utilizing this component as a thought leader is essential. There are many different avenues to take when creating a video, but it’s important to focus on the content, audience and what you want them to take away from the information you present. Videos can also be a way to be more personable if you film them yourself!
3. Articles: Articles are one of the more common forms of thought leadership content. As the author of the article, which includes useful information, key data and more, readers see that and associate you with industry expertise.
4. Podcasts: Podcasts are becoming utilized more and more by B2B leaders. The great thing about podcasts? It can be almost anything you want it to be! You can host other B2B industry leaders, customers and even team members. Presenting relevant information, whether it be from yourself or the individuals you have on your podcast, will bring listeners back for more because of your trustworthy, impactful information.

Strategies to Make B2B Thought Leadership Content Stand Out

All B2B leaders are producing some form of thought leadership content. Whether it’s the same types of assets you are producing, there are many ways to make yours stand out amongst the rest.

1. Boost credibility through trusted data: Data that is included in thought leadership that is trusted and well-sourced can elevate your information. Adding results or statistics from a research study recently conducted, or even a survey that you distributed yourself, will add an extra sense of credibility to the thought leadership content.
2. Add a personal touch: Consuming a piece of content that is monotone and information only might not be the most effective approach. Adding a personal touch, such as personal experiences or advice, can go a long way. When a reader can make a personal connection to some portion of your content, your brand becomes more memorable to them, thus increasing brand awareness.
3. Promote on social media: This might seem like a no-brainer, but promote your thought leadership content on social media! 48 billion people around the world use social media. This is a large audience to reach, even though you might not be reaching all 4.48 billion. Pushing content to connections on LinkedIn and followers on Facebook and Twitter will help increase the reach. The more people who consume, or even come across your content, the more credible your content is.
4. Mix it up and get creative: Producing the same types of content consistently isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s always nice to mix it up. While the types of content will be similar, adding a creative or unique touch can help make yours stand out. For example, adding new, bold elements in the design of a video or white paper might make the content more appealing thus drawing more attention and increasing the number of people that come across it.

The post Ideas for B2B Thought Leadership Content and Strategies to Stand Out appeared first on Business2Community.

What should B2B companies share on social media?
Should B2B companies even be active on social media?
What social channels are the best for B2B companies?

These are pretty common questions we hear from B2B companies when discussing their digital marketing strategies.

Here is the TL;DR version:

B2B firms should share content that their audience cares about.
B2B companies should be connecting with their clients and prospects on social media.
The social channel that is best for your firm, depends on your audience. For many B2B firms, LinkedIn is a great way to connect, for others, it’s Facebook, for others it’s Instagram, etc.

Below we take a look at what works on social media for B2B companies. Stick around and give it a read.

Thought Leadership

Crafting and sharing insightful thought leadership is always a win for B2B companies. Even if you think your industry is “boring” or “not groundbreaking,” thought leadership content is extremely interesting to professionals working in your industry.

After creating great thought leadership content, post it on your company’s social media pages. Don’t stop there; ask your thought leaders to share it on their own accounts. Why? Many seasoned professionals have a broader network than the B2B company they are with. Also, motivate all employees to share the content with their social media connections. You might be surprised by how many of your personal or work contacts care about what you and your company are doing.

Employee Features

People want to know who they are working with. In many cases, a strong personal rapport goes a long way for keeping up professional relationships – be it vendors, clients, partners, or other industry professionals. If you are looking for content to craft to share on your social media channels, consider employee features or highlights. It’s a double-win – it showcases your fantastic internal talent and it invites your followers and connections to learn more about your team and company culture.

Never underestimate the value of a human connection.

Awards or Milestones

Social media is a great place to celebrate wins and achievements, both personally and professionally. For B2B companies, it’s a great idea to share company awards or milestones with your audience. This not only shows that you are best in class and therefore an excellent potential partner, but it also shows your existing clients that you are continually improving and innovating.

Behind the Scenes

Humans by nature are curious about what other humans are up to. Invite your social media followers behind the scenes at your company. Share posts about internal company events or celebrations. At Bop Design, we host weekly happy hours for our employees. While these are typically closed events, we share pictures on social media to show our followers more about our internal culture and how our team enjoys each other’s company on and off the clock. Your B2B firm is made up of people, so never hesitate to share behind-the-scenes content.

Sharing Client Wins

Where would we be without successful clients? At the core, a company is only as strong or successful as its clients. As long as you don’t have an NDA in place, start sharing your client wins on social media. Showcase any new breakthroughs they are making, or new products they are launching, or even achievements they have earned. Social media isn’t just about your firm, it’s about your connections and their wins as well. Be sure to take time to highlight the movers and shakers you work with.

The post What Works on Social Media for B2B Companies? appeared first on Business2Community.

15 Awesome B2B Video Examples

Whether you’re explaining your service, introducing a new product, or offering a peek behind your company walls, there are all sorts of ways you can incorporate video into your content strategy. We hope these awesome B2B video examples inspire you to turn on the camera (or turn to a video production team) to tell an interesting and engaging story.

1) My Shot + Your Illustration by Dropbox

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnFIDg2RO2o

In only 16 seconds, Dropbox turns heads with an exciting video to promote Dropbox Paper (a collaborative creation tool). The video really makes a splash thanks to its high energy, bright graphics, and upbeat music. Whereas so many B2B videos are boring, Dropbox turned a simple promo video into a bold and bright invitation to create with them.

2) BI vs. IT: The Struggle for Data Ends Now by Snowflake

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvr4yzs9Vio

Whether you want to make your viewer feel joy, curiosity, or desire, video is a great way to do it. (Find out more about the phenomena of emotional contagion and why watching video makes us feel strong emotions.) In the case of this Snowflake video, the brand uses humor to deliver its message. This spot pits two departments against each other in the most entertaining way. What can end the war between Business Intelligence and IT? Spoiler: Snowflake.

3) Introducing the New SurveyMonkey by SurveyMonkey

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnET-g7NTao

You don’t need a whole cast and screenplay to create a strong B2B video. This example uses no VO—just slick 3D animations, kinetic movement, and energetic music to showcase how easy it is to use SurveyMonkey. Even though they’re not saying a word, their bubbly brand personality is clear from the first frame.

4) Not To Scale by WorkingFrom_

Design is truly one of the best ways to differentiate your brand in everything from your website, to your sales collateral, to your videos. This piece from WorkingFrom_ is such a departure from so much of the B2B content we see. Its character animations make it playful, novel, and personable—the perfect vibe for an explainer video.

5) Airtable: Your All-in-One Production Kit by Airtable

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkBSLMRDL5E

Again, a simple demo video can be droll, but Airtable’s is anything but. Colorful motion graphics add a sense of energy, while seamless transitions navigate you through the platform easily. It’s the perfect pitch—in under 2 minutes.

6) Connect Everything by Okta

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWqtjxmDd1s

You may not have the budget for multiple actors or flashy animations, but you don’t necessarily need to. This video by Okta proves the power of kinetic text. It’s a minimal treatment that makes a big impact—proving that less is more sometimes.

7) Welcome to the Future of HCM by Workday

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpuYpJWD58k

This is one of those B2B video examples that uses every storytelling tool. Live-action, animation, kinetic text, and even stock photography and footage can be especially exciting, as we see in this Workday spot. By combining a variety of imagery, the pacing feels energetic and exciting as Workday walks us through their product benefits.

8) Intro to Salesforce for Small Business by Salesforce

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDBSLcGp-80

Good storytelling will always make your video more interesting. In this example, we see how small business owner Karl benefits from Salesforce’s tools. This approach adds a little levity—a great way to entertain and infuse a human element into a video.

9) Slack Teams Do Amazing Things — “Traffic” by Slack

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW9FyAi9a_M

We’re a sucker for great 3D animation, so this Slack video is a dream. Filled with colorful, quirky animated characters (that also speak gibberish), Slack created a playful and slightly absurd world to showcase how their product helps companies run (particularly relevant if you are also crash-testing funky alien creatures at your job).

10) Grow Better With HubSpot by Hubspot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrLyMDBt0Ps

Many of the B2B video examples we’ve shown here appeal to our more playful sides. However, Hubspot zigs where others zag with this surprisingly emotional spot. Through beautiful collage-style visuals and simple VO, the spot is a call to “grow better” as businesses. We particularly love that they bravely plant a flag in their industry and invite you to come along with them.

11) Adobe Anthem by Adobe

Adobe creative tools invite users to follow their imagination, and this spot is a call to all—with no words. Set to the song “Pure Imagination” (famously sung by Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka), it’s a technicolor adventure through the beautiful visuals that can be made with the tool. This beautiful blend of sentimentality and encouragement makes for a particularly compelling video.

12) Turn Ordinary Workdays Into Extraordinary Experiences by ServiceNow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZkOXfYdipI

We love a theme, and this video shows how much personality you can pepper into a seemingly simple concept. This video is an energetic montage that places the word “now” into a variety of scenes. Beyond the creative visual treatments, the seamless editing makes it particularly energetic and exciting.

13) Now What, That’s What by Mailchimp

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhfd9w6XWQo

Try as we might, we just can’t get over our brand crush on Mailchimp. They’re pros at injecting B2B with pure personality. They use empathy to showcase the frustrations of being a new business owner while offering the easy next steps to grow your business (using their product). It’s great, relatable content.

Tip: Empathetic marketing is particularly powerful. Find out how other brands have done it well.

14) A Kid’s Perspective of SAP by SAP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrtqfpOfXpw

Not every B2B video has to promo a product/service. Video is actually one of the greatest ways to showcase your employer brand (aka your culture). SAP does this superbly in this equally adorable and entertaining video, which features the kids of SAP employees trying to describe what their parents do. Created to promote Take Your Child to Work Day, this video feels like a late-night show segment—not a piece of content from a B2B software solution company. Well done.

15) Meet Our Robotics Researchers at Bosch by Bosch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Fm5MUaaxEY

You wouldn’t necessarily think robotics researchers have the best sense of humor, so this video is a refreshing take. Bosch takes the time to show us what life is like in their labs, featuring real employees and their AI counterparts.

Read More:

• Video Editing Software for Small Businesses to Improve Video Marketing
• Best Video Editing Software for eCommerce

The post 15 B2B Video Examples That Are Anything But Boring appeared first on Business2Community.

Show me any company, and I’ll show you how they use technology. Because every company interacts with software in some way, every person can be a tech worker. Tech companies are looking for employees with skills that make a good employee. They can teach you how to use their software, but they can’t teach you to think for yourself.

Tech work is about skills, not software

Every forward-thinking company is a company that lives and dies by its data and its technology. Retail companies use software to learn about customers, market to them, manufacture the products, track inventory, and balance logistics. Hospitality and service industry companies also need to understand their customers, marketing, and supply chains to better serve their customers.

Tech workers are those individuals who can collect, understand, and put this data to good use. A lot of time that looks like sitting in front of a computer and entering information into software programs. But what drives the understanding of that data is critical thinking, creative problem solving, and using data to draw conclusions across all parts of the business. All of that is done by the employees, not the software.

When we think about tech work, we often have a vision of a software developer sitting at a computer with green code streaming over a black background. While some of tech work is development work, companies need HR, sales, and marketing positions to support the company as well.

HR jobs in tech

Technology companies are run by people who need access to benefits, who need to get paid, and who need to hire more employees. Human resources at a tech company may require some on-the-job training to understand the types of roles that need to be filled, but technology HR teams still work to find, support, and improve the performance of the employees at the company. Anyone who is interested in helping companies and individuals improve their working lives should consider how a move to tech HR can help them.

Sales and customer success for technology companies

The product may change, but sales and customer success teams deal with their customers in much the same way across many different industries. These teams need to understand the product they’re selling, the needs of the customer, and how the company can best serve their customer. But you use the same skills of empathy and emotional intelligence whether you’re serving customers hamburgers or selling software.

Marketing for tech

Marketers identify the product’s audience, understand the tools they have at their disposal to connect with the audience and execute on tactics and strategy to make that customer aware of the product. And while there may be some difference between marketing to a B2B or B2C audience, the core skills are the same. Tech needs marketers who can clearly identify a problem and show the path to a solution for many different audiences.

Data and IT for tech doesn’t have to be about software development

Tech companies also need employees who are interested in technology and IT, but who aren’t restricted to coding. Business intelligence teams need data analysts, data scientists, statisticians, and data coordinators who understand how a spreadsheet and a database might interact. Tech companies also need people who love computers — but aren’t developers — to ensure that all of the employees have the secure hardware and software they need.

Finding the right tech job takes creative thinking

It’s a candidate’s market, so consider applying to the job you want, not necessarily the job you’re ready to take on. Any company can teach you to use their CRM software or to write formulas in a spreadsheet. But if you have the skills of critical thinking, creative problem solving, and the data-based decision making, a good company will recognize that. These are soft skills that cannot be easily taught, and that indicate a high-value employee.

Read More:

• Best CRM Software
• Best Email Marketing Software
• Best SMS Marketing Software
• Top SEO Marketing Tools

The post Anyone Can Work In Tech, And We Need More Employees Like You appeared first on Business2Community.