Chart of the Day: How businesses are promoting their content
Content marketing is the mainstay of many marketing strategies for both small and large companies. We can spend hours thinking up a theme our audience would be interested in and once you have found it, more hours are spent writing the content, finding accompanying imagery plus there is the possibility that you will need a little design help to turn your page of words into an ebook, white paper, infographic etc. By the time you have completed your brand new piece of content you have to get to work promoting it so that you can attract as many readers as possible. But how do you do this?
Linkedin and BrightTalk surveyed over 600 survey B2B marketing professionals and found that the most popular channel for promoting their content was through social media. This makes sense as it doesn't require any budget- only the marketer's time…
The key trends that business-to-business marketers need to act on in 2017
Since we're now well into 2017, it's a natural time for all marketers to review the marketing tactics they've used this year and assess their approaches against other businesses in the sector. For marketers involved in the B2B sector, there are some particularly pressing issues which, if they can be addressed will help 'feed the funnel' and develop more quality leads.
A good starting point for reviewing the trends that will make an impact next year is to think through innovation across all the main digital marketing channels. In our article on marketing trends for 2017, we asked marketers to assess the techniques which would give them the biggest uplift on business in 2017. The results show that the top rated techniques which should get focus next year are closely aligned with B2B sector, which has for the past…
Predictive analytics and consultative selling among the most important trends for B2B sales strategy in 2017
As a marketer, you’re more than familiar with the importance of closing the gap between marketing and sales. It’s been proven over and over that the more these teams talk, the better the results.
Yet according to Aberdeen group, salespeople still spend an average of 440 hours a year searching for the right content to use. Furthermore, 65% of marketing content isn’t used by sales at all!
When looking at the most popular sales trends for 2017, three are crucial when bridging this gap. These trends are most likely to inform your sales enablement content over the next year and beyond
In this article, we’re going to analyse each trend to see not only how they will contribute to your sales enablement efforts, but your marketing strategy as a whole.
1. Subject Matter Experts will Play Salesperson & Marketer
The…
9 types of Email Marketing to engage B2B audiences
Email is the go-to form of customer and prospect communication for many businesses today, allowing clear, concise and detailed conversations. In fact, 73% of marketers agree that the email marketing is core to their business and 40x more effective than social media for lead generation.
Is your business capitalising on this B2B marketing opportunity?
The longer life-span of emails in comparison to social posts means there is more time for businesses to leverage on making a sale or closing a deal. With a current estimate of 100 billion business emails being sent every day, this number of business email accounts is expected to rise to 4.9 billion by 2017.
Overall, email marketing continues to be ranked as the best channel in terms of return on investment, with 68% of…
Chart of the Day: It's never good to compare yourself to others - except when it comes to Email Marketing.
Benchmarking your email marketing is extremely important. It is pivotal to know if you are outperforming your sector or if you need to adjust your tactics.
If you work in B2B then the key stat you need to pay attention to is the fact that B2B retail has an open rate of 24.24% and the click rate is 4.75%. Whereas B2C - Other is slightly lower with an open rate of 22.64% and click rate of 4.04%.
Email benchmarking is discussed in greater detail in our post, Email Statistics - 2017 update.
Source: Email marketing benchmark reports 2017
Sample Size: 1.5 billion emails over 2016
Recommended Resource: Email Marketing Guide
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The why and how of omni-channel B2B marketing
Omni-channel marketing is a buzz phrase that is used interchangeably with other phrases such as cross-channel marketing; multichannel marketing and my preferred term integrated marketing.
Omni-channel is a complex, customer-centric approach to marketing. It's all about thinking holistically in terms of customer experience, interactions, and messaging.
From a B2B perspective, it is about being relevant in all the places a customer wants or expects to find you. This, although the use of ‘omni’ implies it, doesn’t necessarily mean everywhere!
A seamless omni-channel experience
What does a seamless omni-channel experience look like?
It looks connected and joined up. That is to say if, on a given day or week, you visited a website, a Facebook page, saw an ad (print, banner or retargeted), received an email, saw a POS in-store, they would be all be talking about the same thing.
Omni-channel marketing works totally irrespective of the channel rather than merely…
How to avoid the common pitfalls of B2B marketing campaigns
As a marketer with practical experience within the B2B space as well as working as a trainer, teaching a number of digital marketing subjects, means I have direct access to marketers and business owners. I've noticed a number of issues and themes have appeared quite frequently over the last 12 to 18 months. When coming up with the 10 mistakes for this guide I brainstormed with Dave and his team and it was a much wider list!
We boiled down to 10 themes that I have explored in detail, giving you some background into what they are and examples which you may sympathize with or are currently experiencing. The advice to tackle these issues includes a mini do to list to help shape your actions plans, and it goes without saying that there are more practical and detailed resources within the Smart Insights…
Chart of the Day: Delivering quality leads is the #1 objective for B2B marketers in 2017
Todays, Chart of the Day is actually compilation of charts from DemandWave's State of B2B digital marketing report 2017. They asked nearly 200 B2B marketers what they saw as the pressing issues and trends for this year. When asked what the #1 objective of their digital marketing was the top answer was "deliver quality leads". This is unsurprising, but also an important issue for B2B marketers who need to provide enough leads to keep the sales team busy, while also not having them chasing prospects that will never convert.
The respondents were also asked which channels were a part of their marketing mix and Social media came out top with 95% saying they used Social to deliver their objectives with Email and Organic Search making up the top 3.
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What is B2i marketing and how can it help you make your marketing smarter?
You’ve heard of B2B and B2C - But what about B2i? B2B marketers and strategists are quickly adopting this emerging trend that puts their businesses in direct contact with their clients’ end-consumers: from business to individual.
As the world becomes more interconnected, businesses are beginning to understand that they must think beyond the needs of their immediate clients and consider their clients’ clients as well. Sure, they still might sell directly to the CEOs, CIOs, and other C-suite executives. But their solutions must address their clients’ core needs, which always go back to the individual consumer.
Most people assume that the “I” in B2i is for “internet.” But B2i isn’t about online marketing. B2i demands a holistic view of a client’s business, especially as companies create new business models to…
Research shows most important factors for selecting martech
Marketers now have many, many potential marketing technologies they can deploy as shown by our 30 categories of martech relevant for all businesses serious about growth and optimisation. Selecting any type of new marketing technology is a serious businesses since although many services today offer paying monthly, collection of data and integration with other systems mean that although it's easy to switch providers in theory, in practice it often isn't. Of course, this depends whether it is a mission-critical systems like CRMs, which involve a lengthy migration between platforms compared to AB testing tools which can be switched relatively easily.
This research from Trustradius covers the factors that are important in taking a decision.
The research shows that buyers want hands-on experience with the product and insights from customers. Product demos and free trials were the best…
