Which Key Features Must Your Persona Include?
Personas are a well-established marketing technique to help produce more customer-focused communications. They can be applied to both business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets. However taking a look at how marketers search for information about personas in Google Trends shows that there are a relatively low volume of searches.
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You can see there is a clear up-tick in interest in personas over the last few years which I think is related to interest in content marketing for which personas are often recommended to generate relevant personas for different audiences.
In this article I will introduce the value of using personas which we’re big fans of using to create more personalised email and web-based conversations with prospects as part of marketing automation.
The benefits of buyer personas for content marketing
To support content marketing initiatives, personas are valuable…
The essential strategies you need to successfully win major B2B customers.
Although the phrase has been around for over a decade and arguably being deployed by smart marketers ever since B2B sales teams have focused on target/key accounts, in recent years account-based marketing (ABM) has become hotter than ever.
As far back as 1993, Peppers and Rogers proposed marketing would take an increased role in developing intelligence on key accounts: “When two marketers are competing for the same customer’s business, all other things being equal, the marketer with the greatest scope of information about that particular customer... will be the more efficient competitor.”[1]
In short, ABM is a strategic approach that coordinates personalised sales and marketing efforts, to target specific accounts for new business and create deeper and broader relationships with existing customers.[2]
It’s clear to see from Google Trends, the term account-based marketing, was being searched since the Information…
Every B2B marketer's holy PECR is on the chopping block
So, you thought the Privacy and Electronics Communications Regulations, your precious PECR, was going to save you from the new ePrivacy rules. Unfortunately not. The PECR appears to be on the chopping block and there is only one way it is going: to fall in line with the new EU General Data Protection Regulations.
"Oh!" I hear you cry. "But I didn't listen to the GDPR changes because I assumed it didn't apply to B2B marketers!"
Well, I have good news and bad news for you. Let's start with the good news, shall we? You've got the rest of this year and until 25th May 2018 to make sure your marketing data does comply with the GDPR. There are 17 months between now and then, giving you plenty of time to make sure that anyone on your email mailing lists has given you…
How to know your audience and create the right content for them
We've all heard the phrase ‘the client is king’. In practice, this means that an important part of marketing is an exercise of empathy, which consists of finding out who our audience is, so we can give them what they want in a better way than our competition.
This simple idea should also be the center of your efforts when it comes to increasing your leads. You should adjust to them, and to their buying process. You should give your prospects the answers they are looking for, when they’re looking for them, in an appropriate way to address the subject of their interest.
The Inbound Approach
But let’s start from the beginning. You may have heard the term “inbound marketing” before. If you haven't, it mainly consists of making leads…
Chart of the Day: Content marketing continues to be a key tactic for B2B lead generation.
Over 600 B2B marketing professionals were asked "How is your content production going to change over the next 12 months?", a whopping 71% said they plan on increasing production, with a quarter saying they will increase production significantly.
Content marketing will continue being a major focus for B2B marketers in 2017. For those implementing an inbound marketing strategy in the year ahead, it is important that you find the right balance between quantity and quality. The production of only a handful of highly engaging pieces of content has the potential to keep you in leads for months with the right amount of promotion.
Source: BrightTalk
Data:over 600 survey responses from B2B marketing professionals.
Recommended Resource: Content Marketing Checklist
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Practical content marketing and profiling techniques to identify senior decision makers
Senior decision makers are increasingly reluctant to hand over their contact details when exploring potential solutions. You may have noticed how busy managers often omit their phone numbers from their email sigs! At the same time, the explosion in content marketing with the availability of detailed information online in a range of formats has enabled those seeking to use your products or services to carry out extensive research on you independently without booking a demo.
There is now little need to book a demo, take a trial or speak to a salesperson when so much content exists online to inform their decision.
Whilst these prospects are carrying out their due diligence research at distance, others who are at a much earlier stage of the buying cycle are seeking content that will inform and educate them.
Whitepapers, videos, thought-leadership pieces and research are standard fare in any…
3 rules to inform your content marketing strategy
Many B2B companies are still adapting to the new opportunities of content marketing, and too many are still playing by the old rules. This involves with massively wordy, downloadable eBooks and content designed for the Desktop Era. Content marketing has changed along with the larger trends in technology and with shifting consumer preferences for how people access information and engage with content online, and your B2B content marketing strategies need to change along with it!
Here are some new rules of content marketing that any B2B firm can benefit from:
Make it "mobile first."
Mobile devices now represent a majority of internet usage, and many people are using smartphones as their primary device for accessing the Internet. But mobile devices aren’t just for teenagers or millennials, and they’re not just for consumers – more and more B2B buyers are using mobile devices to conduct research about…
Getting social media right for B2B marketing is tricky, but not impossible.
In today’s Internet-driven marketplace, having an online presence is non-negotiable and has become an important part of B2B marketing for almost every business. When it comes to making purchasing decisions, your potential customers use social media sites and search engines to answer questions about the products/services you sell and to get an overall sense as to who you are, what you do and what others think about you.
Social media can help B2B companies by putting them in charge of their virtual identities. Far from being simply about status updates, social media is used most effectively as a brand shaper; a way to establish your company’s reputation and expertise, and to build a following based upon exceptional customer service.
Use social media to educate
For larger B2B businesses in…
Optimise your customer journey to turn leads into sales
If your online B2B marketing is well tuned, a potential B2B customer that has conducted a Google search for a product, clicked on an ad, or read your newsletter and/or social media page, arrives at your B2B e-commerce site. As we all know however, simply reaching a landing page doesn’t mean the individual will stay there for long. In fact, according a recent Hubspot article, 55% of browsers will leave a site within just 15 seconds.
Obviously, those numbers aren’t great. To improve them, you need to focus on what drew users to your B2B e-commerce site initially and where your site went wrong in meeting their expectations. After you take the time to analyze this, you can optimize the user journey to convert a visitor from a prospect to…
Focussing on the wrong metrics can be a distraction and a waste of time but there are ways to keep your focus and make measurement worthwhile
When it comes to marketing metrics, do you ever feel like you’re chasing the wind? In the case of false metrics, that’s exactly what you are doing.
False metrics are the metrics that distract you from the metrics that really matter. They’re likely to be everyday KPIs, but they don’t really have an impact on the bottom line.
In the world of marketing, false metrics appear all too often and it is commonplace to hear about the wrong metrics being measured and reported.
Examples of the wrong metrics would be:
Chasing Facebook ‘likes’ or Twitter followers
Looking at social media reach
Undertaking an SEO campaign in order to increase traffic to your website.
There is a tendency to just gauge what…
