A content marketing funnel acts as a guide for your prospects and leads. It shows them the specific steps they need to take before purchasing your product or service
According to Demand Metric, content marketing generates three times more leads than outbound marketing and it’s about 62% less costly. As a B2B brand, if you want to attract more leads to your business and spend less to do so, you should leverage content marketing.
[caption id="attachment_148039" align="aligncenter" width="550"] [Image via Demand Metric][/caption]To do this effectively, you need a content marketing funnel. A content marketing funnel acts as a guide for your prospects and leads. It shows them the specific steps they need to take before purchasing your product or service. It also helps your business get more qualified leads.
In this post, you will learn how to create a…
Chart of the Week: 86% of B2B marketers have used content marketing to achieve brand awareness goals in the last year
B2B marketers are successfully using content marketing to achieve top-of-the-funnel goals, with 86% saying they have used it to achieve their brand awareness goals in the last 12 months.
New research from the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) has revealed that content marketing is helping 79% of marketers to educate their audiences while 75% are successfully using it to build credibility and/or trust. However, fewer marketers are managing to make the most of content marketing when it comes to actions deeper in the funnel.
According to the 2020 B2B Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report, just 63% are managing to use content marketing to build loyalty with existing clients or customers, suggesting they could be missing out on a…
Don't let your B2B site lose you leads by making these five basic mistakes
There are literally millions of business to business websites out there, but not all of them are as efficient as they could be. The purpose of creating and managing a B2B website is mainly to engage with your audience and turn them from passive viewers into active clients. So, why is it so hard to engage the audience that visits your website?
Firstly, most of the B2B websites don’t respect a set of basic rules that ensure success. They usually focus on the wrong thing, forgetting about the audience. A B2B website is, of course, a way for you to present and advertise your business, but it should be much more than that.
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Content marketing is one of the best ways to generate leads as a B2B company. However, many struggle with executing it correctly. Are you one of them?
Around 70% of users on the internet learn via content before purchasing a product versus traditional advertisements. Times are changing.
The average person used to need advertisements to tell them about a product or service.
Not anymore. B2B consumers are smarter and more resourceful than ever. They have everything they need at their fingertips to make an informed decision.
That’s where content marketing comes in. It aligns with this behaviour by offering high-quality valuable content that educates prospects on a relevant topic. This, when done properly, gets them sucked into your lead generation funnel, as well.
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It’s never been easier for B2B businesses to identify and target their ideal customers online.
"I have a great product or service but I just can’t seem to be able to find buyers."
I hear this a lot. It's one of the most frustrating things for a passionate business owner or manager with a solution that can solve a genuine problem for people.
For anyone who says "my product/service is for anyone that wants it", this may be true; but it won’t help you with your marketing strategy.
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Think about a sliding scale. At one end you have people who don’t, and probably never will have an interest in your solution.
At the other end, you have the person who recognizes…
Going viral is something of a dream for us B2B content creators and marketers. You’d be lying if you deny that, plain and simple
And why not? Creating original, high-quality content is a monumental task in itself, let alone marketing it and making it stand out. The thought of our content spreading across the internet like wildfire is often what keeps us going.
However, for B2B marketers, achieving virality with a well-written blog post is even more inconceivable. That’s because our audience is highly targeted professionals and business leaders, and our content is not meant to entertain or amuse. Going viral with a piece of content is somewhat akin to finally getting our "big break" in the digital industry, after writing countless blog posts, outreach emails, and what have you.
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Three ideas to help plan your digital marketing in 2019
With the end of the year on the horizon, as inevitable as night follows day, many people will be looking ahead to 2019 with a host of New Year resolutions:
Whilst some claim that these good intentions don’t work, it’s hard to argue that an ambition to get fit, eat well or start a new initiative isn’t a positive way to start the year. New Year resolutions may not always last, but at least people acknowledge that there may be room for improvement in their lives.
Good businesses will also be looking for ways to improve and there is already a range of business-critical trends to bear in mind for 2019. As with personal resolutions, professionals are always looking for an…
New research highlights activities from the top performers
Joe Pullizzi and team over at the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) have been doing a great job in tracking trends in content marketing over the years. I still think of content marketing as a relatively new label for a marketing technique that has existed as long as print (see this video history of how content marketing has evolved from 1895). Yet it’s now ten years since I first read ‘Get Content, Get Customers’ by Joe, which was the first call-to-action to modern content marketing that started the latest trend.
Content marketing management trends for 2019
The latest trends and success factors for the year ahead are highlighted in this research, which focuses on B2B marketer responses, but highlights content marketing strategy success factors relevant for many other organisations. These are highlighted by categorisation of respondents by ‘top performers’ who characterizes his or her organization’s…
Statistics exploding the myths that mobile marketing is less important in B2B sectors
We have documented the ongoing growth of mobile adoption in our mobile statistics compilation. Yet most of our stats are based on consumer surveys and panels. It's rare for B2B specific data to be shown. Given this lack of insight, most businesses will turn to their analytics to assess the importance of visitors from smartphones.
Looking at our own analytics, for Smart Insights it seems that mobile visits are relatively unimportant, with smartphones currently accounting for 19% of visitors, with an increase of around 8% increase year-on-year. Yet, one-fifth of all visits IS significant, especially since as you see with B2C organizations, our conversion rates are lower on smartphones, so lead generation is challenging on mobile.
The Boston Consulting Group research on mobile use in B2B
Given the lack of research on B2B mobile adoption, it was interesting to see this report looking…
How to boost business results by recognizing cognitive biases
In the 1970’s two young psychologists named Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky pioneered a new field of study, which eventually became known as behavioural psychology. They were interested in understanding whether humans were rational, economic decision-makers or fallible creatures, vulnerable to mistakes and errors as a result of ‘cognitive load’. Their research suggested that our brains use two ‘systems’ for making decisions:
In the words of Daniel Kahneman, system one ‘runs the show’ but is powered by a range of heuristics, or rules of thumb, which lead to biases and behavioural quirks.
There are now nearly 200 recognized cognitive biases that can affect how we make decisions in a multitude of different ways. Some are fairly well known (e.g. anchoring) whilst others are slightly more obscure (e.g. the false consensus…
