Ideas to increase visibility and sharing on Slideshare

I thought this was a nice piece of content marketing by Slideshare, so thought it was worth sharing to highlight Slideshare’s ongoing importance if you market to professional B2B audiences. As Dan said in this previous post on 7 Reasons B2B marketers should love Slideshare: "Assuming that you’re a B2B marketer, and have good content that can be directly used or re-purposed for Slideshare, we think that Slideshare is a grossly under-utilised tool, especially since the “Pro” version launched" This new Slideshare from Slideshare is worth scanning if your a B2B Marketer since it’s a nice summary of what worked for companies recently with examples. SlideShare Zeitgeist 2013 from SlideShare Apart from the deck itself, the content marketing I…

Research shows how just-in-time content can re-engage abandoning visitors

When it comes to bounce on B2B landing pages, the numbers are depressing. Marketers put a lot of time and energy into these crucial pages, and research says the large majority of businesses depend on landing pages as part of their lead-generation strategy. Yet the majority (more than 50%) of traffic will bounce, perhaps never to return. The waste and inefficiency can be HUGE if landing pages aren't optimised or other relevant content isn't available. [Editor's note: This post reviews different ways to measure engagement and explains bounce rate and typical benchmarks if your not familiar with it. Bounce rates for blogs can be in the range 60-80%, so it's worthwhile designing the blog to encourage some of these visitors to engage more]. Much of the time spent developing effective landing pages focuses on content optimization and enticing calls-to-action (CTAs) to grab…

Defining ROI and the digital skills gap are major challenges

An online survey of 100 marketing leaders, the B2B Leaders report in association with Circle Research, involved Marketing Directors, Heads of Marketing and Marketing with an average 15 years experience, reporting into board or leadership teams and controlling a total of £188m. The survey delved into brand management, demonstrating ROI, managing a team effectively and personal reputation. For more specific detail on Content Marketing, see our separate post on B2B Content Marketing trends for 2014. The findings have been summarised in this infographic, we have shared for our readers working in B2B marketing to provide context if you are looking to understand typical B2B priorities for the next 12 months and how to develop marketers skills and training accordingly. …

6 simple techniques to build business relationships through email marketing

Even though email marketing continues to be a core business-to-business (B2B) communication for sales and marketing teams, the market continues to grow from a solely email marketing approach to that of integrated marketing communication.

Rather than using email as a means in which to provide one-way communication the goal is provide marketers with the ability to track, build relationships and manage digital campaigns whilst monitoring a flow of leads - known as Marketing Automation.

Successful marketing automation campaigns consist of three core elements: 1. Email marketing 2. Lead generation 3. An effective marketing database. In this article we're going to look at some basic techniques to build B2B relationships through email. Join our free B2B Email marketing webcast for more details and examples. …

Managing the Content Marketing Avalanche

Managing Content Marketing can often feel like getting caught in a relentless wave that you can’t fight against, so when speaking at the #B2Bconf from B2B Marketing managing this challenge is what I chose as my theme. I selected 10 key areas to help with planning in the year ahead based on the latest research and my experiences of content marketing. Most who work within B2B Marketing have bought into the power of content marketing to create leads, indeed any marketer who has worked in B2B industries for some time will tell you that they practised Content Marketing before Joe Pulizzi and the Content Marketing Institute created the category. In this post I’ll give a brief summary and recommendations based on the research and trends I covered in my talk with links to more detail. My Slideshare is embedded at the end of this post.

Trend 1: A planned,…

The essential ingredients of a B2B Digital Strategy

Professional service marketing has rarely ever been about creating immediate business transactions. It's always been a long-term effort of building reputation, demonstrating capabilities and showcasing credibility through opinion and thought leadership.

Whilst content marketing and promotion through social media remains a core activity of professional services digital marketing, most marketers experience a rapidly expanding gap between the demand for material and their ability to consistently execute on that demand internally. The sources of thought leadership content are usually the practising professionals, who are often too busy and aligned with managing ongoing client caseloads and maintaining existing client bases.

Given the economic pressure on firms to maintain – and improve – profitability, as with most initiatives, developing a digital strategy tends to be viewed as less important than shorter-term business development methods. But whilst most professional service…

Content marketing Survey on B2B marketing

The Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, undertook a survey sponsored by Brightcove, to ask over 1,200 B2B Marketers in the US the key marketing tactics from last year and to discuss their focus for 2014.

 'Heading into 2014, many B2B marketers are feeling more confident than ever about the effectiveness of their content marketing strategies,' said Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute and author of Epic Content Marketing. 'Though the industry is still in the early adoption phase of content marketing, it's clear that many are seeing success and are continuing to increase their tactics and devote more resources, and budgets, to producing great content experiences.'

Key content marketing survey findings included:

93% of B2B organisations are using content-based tactics and 73% are producing more content than the previous year.86% have someone who oversees content marketing strategy30%…

Overcome your 'oops' with agile content marketing

All was well in the best of possible worlds...

July 2011. We were all excited: we had just launched phase one of our first major online content marketing campaign. We released on time and everything was all well in the world. So we continued preparing the content for phase two, and we released it as per the tactical schedule. Still with beaming smiles on our faces. Two months after the launch of the campaign, we thought: 'I know this is a long-term campaign and we’ve got many more phases to come, but how is it performing so far?'

Oops!

We had everything in place: the content and the promotion, and the page views coming in. Except we’d forgotten to instrument some of the calls-to-action and hyperlinks on the landing pages to see how visitors were behaving on the site.

Oops!

We didn’t have all the data we needed to…

What social media marketing can learn from real-life networking events

One of the oldest forms of sales and marketing is to go to a real-life in-person networking event. While these real-life networking events don’t have all of the efficiency and measurability of social media marketing, if you’re looking to get more sales leads from your social media marketing efforts, there are a lot of tips and ideas that we can learn from being in a room with real people.

Using social media in networking events

Here are some ways that real-life networking events can inspire us to get better results from social media marketing: 1. Find out 'who should I meet?' When you go to a real-life networking event, it doesn’t do any good to just scurry around the room trying to talk with anyone and everyone. Instead, you should use a focused approach.Find a short list of 5-10 companies that you would definitely…

Bridge the gap in your content marketing

A recent Financial Services Content Marketing survey for the UK found that although over 80 per cent of respondents believe content marketing will be more important over the next 12 months, yet only 41 per cent have a strategy. Research on B2B Content Marketers' use of Content Marketing from the Content Marketing Institute in the United States shows a similar situation with a large proportion not having a documented content marketing strategy:

So, what is required for a successful content marketing strategy? Here are my rules to bridge that gap:

5 Content Marketing Rules

1. It’s not just a tick-box exercise

There’s more to content marketing than just churning out content via every available channel – from Twitter to Pinterest. The greatest ROI comes from mapping a funnel of engagement and taking a customer or prospect on a journey. You need…