Rebranding is exactly what the word suggests, giving your brand a new identity. Developing a new identity can be a challenge for established organizations that have grown attached to their existing brand. However, your brand is more than just symbols and a name, it is the sum of your vision, culture, mission, products/services, customers, and even prospective customers.
But, why? After all, building any brand’s persona takes time and is done after careful consideration, so why would you change all this. You have a point, but we at Maven Collective Marketing want to give you another perspective on what rebranding can mean for a B2B technology company.
Why is Rebranding Important?
Businesses grow and evolve over time, and it becomes essential to ensure that your brand is keeping pace. Especially in the rapidly evolving technology industry, staying current determines your relevance in the marketplace. Rebranding allows you to make meaningful changes that infuse your business with new energy.
You should investigate rebranding if it feels like your business is outgrowing its original vision and mission, and/or if your niche market has become increasingly more saturated with competition. There are also times when organizations should consider a brand overhaul to overcome a poor reputation.
Out with the old, In with the New?
Rebranding is a journey you should only embark on with a purpose. It is not a filler project you take on just because you are bored of how your brand looks. Keep that in mind and start by understanding your business values and how they may have changed over time. You have probably added/expanded new service offerings over the years or are trying to capture a new audience segment with your new and shiny SaaS product. A rebrand is an effective way to expand your reach in such cases.
Once you have carefully examined your current position in the market only then you should make informed decisions about overhauling your brand image.
Redesign Your Branding Strategy
A brand refresh brings about several benefits for a B2B technology company, take a look:
Reconnect with Your Audience & Build New Ties
When you refresh the brand, it gives you a new chance to reconnect with your target audience and customer base. By presenting them with a new vision and fresh perspective you are able to show how you have grown over the years. This is also a good opportunity to go after a new market segment with your refreshed look. Sometimes, repositioning oneself in the industry is a creative way to create a buzz in the market and garner more interest from prospective customers.
Modernize and Stay Current
Design trends change over time and so will the direction you choose for your brand identity as the years go by. Businesses often underplay the role of design, but it impacts how you and your work are perceived. Therefore, by maintaining a contemporary look you ensure that your audience knows that you are aware of current trends.
Create a New Vision
Giving yourself a new look is only a part of the package. You can also alter your vision and mission statement, alongside your brand messaging, to better serve your customers. If you are redefining your target audience, a brand refresh enables a smooth transition towards a new vision. You can take this leap to shift the focus of your services and solutions towards those more relevant to your segment.
Update Your Website for a New Look
Differentiate Your Brand
Competition is high wherever you go and the B2B technology industry is already a saturated market. So, after years of serving customers, rebranding is an effective way to ensure people know of your presence and impact. Revamping the look and feel of your business with a more appealing personality will help you establish yourself as the industry leader.
Raise that Bottom Line
After investing time and resources into curating a successful brand refresh strategy your business could see a boost in the overall performance and profitability if done strategically and correctly. As you showcase your expertise in a new light, stand out in the sea of competitors and expand the reach of your offerings, positive results will roll in!
What’s in a Rebrand?
Rebranding has several moving parts. Some of the major changes that take place include logo update, possibly a name change, website redesign, and updating all visual assets for the organization. To be honest, we all know it is not an overnight transformation but one that is gradually molded over time.
Refresh Your Brand Persona with the Mavens
If you are willing to explore this new path for your organization but can’t find the time to get started, leave it to the Mavens! We have extensive experience in giving established B2B tech companies the marketing overhaul that sets them apart from their competition. They have relied on us for giving their work a new look and feel, and we have delivered measurable results. Reach out to us for a free consultation today!
LinkedIn is a sought-after platform by professionals from all industries and has over 500 million active members. Isn’t that a great place not only to build a strong professional profile, but also to build your network with other professionals and create meaningful leads for your business? But simply creating a profile and posting every now and then is not the most efficient way to leverage the power of LinkedIn. In this blog, we will walk you through some of the ways you can leverage your personal profile for LinkedIn lead generation and be that thought-leader you want to be!
Why Invest Your Time in LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a vast platform full of people that are looking for or providing different kinds of solutions and services. It is very likely that on a platform as extensive as this you will cross wires with like-minded professionals. Study shows, LinkedIn is 277% more successful in lead generation than Facebook and Twitter.
LinkedIn is a great place to gain visibility and credibility among your peers and industry experts. Additionally, your presence on LinkedIn helps build a brand image not only for yourself, but also for the company you work for. The platform hosts nearly 740 million users, providing great network expansion opportunities to all members.
Establish Your Presence on LinkedIn
Creating a Linkedin profile is easy, but making it visible and of substantial value is what takes work. It is all about how you curate your profile for other members to enjoy, showcasing your experience, strengths, skills, and winning personality.
Optimize! Optimize! Optimize!
We can’t say this enough about the importance of optimizing your personal LinkedIn profile and posts. It is crucial how others discover your profile, aspects like LinkedIn bio, interest, work, and academic experience, all play a role in your visibility. Adding keyword-heavy details in the ‘About’ area, describing responsibilities under each work/study experience, or including links to projects you have worked on can go a long way in improving your visibility.
Optimize your Personal Profile on LinkedIn
Prove Credibility, Authority, and Expertise on LinkedIn
Skills, endorsements, and recommendations can help your profile stand out among other members that don’t make adequate use of these features.
Utilize Skills and Badges to Show Expertise and Support LinkedIn Lead Generation
They are a good way to get that thought leadership status and how people view and perceive your opinions. Skills and endorsements showcase your strengths and the support you have garnered from others, in turn indicating the trust, authority, and expertise you have in the industry.
Endorsements and Recommendations on a LinkedIn Profile
Engage and Interact with LinkedIn Members
Add people of similar interests as connections and follow your interests, other thought leaders, industry experts, and companies whose work resonates with you. Go ahead and join LinkedIn Groups to widen your network and connect with more people. It is always good to have a healthy mix of connections that ranges from people working in and around your industry and at different hierarchical levels. As you grow your connections, you will have the opportunity to analyze their content and learn from their insights as well. Once you are a group member, make sure to participate actively with relevant and meaningful content. You can even create and manage your own group on LinkedIn, this can be a very significant step to get your business the visibility that it needs.
B2B Linked Lead Generation with Group Membership and Participation
Publish Your LinkedIn Content
Creating and sharing content is crucial to your profile’s success. Identify the gaps in topics in your industry and write about what is most relevant to your audience and connections. Sharing original content in the form of insights or from your blog post is vital to exhibit your knowledge. At the same time, don’t be afraid to reshare content related to your brand or industry. Stay on top of trends and make sure what you post is what the audience seeks.
LinkedIn Activity and Content Promotion
Once again, it is time to stress optimization, but this time of your posts. Use keywords, links, and hashtags to make sure your work is reaching the right people. Tagging related company accounts or personal profiles also increase impressions of your post. Find the right balance of how often you post on LinkedIn, do not bombard your followers with too much information, but pace it out at regular intervals.
Spotlight Your Work in the Featured Section
Use the Featured section of your personal profile to showcase your work samples. This section helps boost your profile with valid examples and proof of work. You can include any form of external media, documents, and links that you would like to be spotlighted when someone views your profile. It is a great way to establish your professional identity!
List your Work Samples and Spotlight Responsibilities
Tapping into In-built Organic Feature for LinkedIn Lead Generation
Begin business development with your closest circle of connections and move outwards. This means 1st, 2nd and 3rd connection emails are your starting point. Reaching out to people in these tiers should get you a measurable response as they are most likely to be familiar with your content, hence, they are more likely to engage with you.
Did you know that the LinkedIn platform is the best place for account-based marketing? Narrow down on the industry, size, and interests of your current customers and find others like them on LinkedIn. Use professional demographics to determine who your potential customers are, it is all about persona building and finding those that fit into it in a professional capacity.
Utilize LinkedIn Events as a way to get more information to your audience. Depending upon your target you can organize meetups, workshops, seminars or several other types of events. This is an engaging way of driving interest in your work or solution and building a professional community that further facilitates LinkedIn Lead Generation. You don’t have to organize events for all LinkedIn page followers and can target specific segments and host verticalized events or product demos for specific functions. With events, you can also capture information about your attendees and view their experiences before, during, and after the event. All that information can be really helpful for future marketing initiatives as well.
Creating an Event on LinkedIn for Meaningful Lead Generation
If you are the administrator of a group on LinkedIn, you can send out announcements in the form of emails to your group members. This can include anything from a whitepaper to a product update, webinar, or free trial. It is a simple way to reach out to a large number of people and capture information about those that show interest.
Go Premium on LinkedIn
The LinkedIn Premium account has many added features that you can utilize to harness more leads from the platform. In the premium account, you get regular analytics like search terms and trends to improve your professional presence. Furthermore, it is uncommon to find contact details of other industry professionals on LinkedIn, but with Premium, you get to unlock more InMail credits that you can use to reach out to industry leaders and build connections with larger networks.
We might have given you a lot to consider about LinkedIn and its features. A good place to start would be with your own profile and taking small steps towards optimization. In our next blog, we will uncover more aspects of LinkedIn that help build your company’s presence and how to drive traffic from your Company Page, Showcase Page, and using Sales Navigator and several other Paid LinkedIn Features.
If you have any questions about LinkedIn Marketing and conquering social media platforms for your business, please reach out to us!
Some B2B digital marketing trends never go out of style. Here are some tactics that you should utilize to see a greater impact and return on investment from your digital marketing efforts.
The use of video calling skyrocketed as organizations around the world adapted to remote work and it doesn’t look like this digital marketing trend will be slowing down anytime soon.
The pandemic had a huge impact on the popularity growth of video conferencing, webinars and virtual events, but they were all on the rise long before ‘social distancing’ became part of our daily vocabulary.
The good news is that including webinars, videos and virtual events in your B2B digital marketing strategy can open up a number of opportunities for lead generation, improving the buyer journey, and expanding your brand reach.
Use Webinars and Virtual Events for Lead Generation
Producing high-quality webinars and virtual events that truly add value to attendees can take a lot of work, but we promise that it will pay off and the rewards will be worth the effort!
Not only do webinars position you as an authority and a thought leader, but they are also a great vehicle for generating high-quality leads. People that are willing to take the time out of their day to join your webinar are likely to be highly engaged and searching to add value to their organization within your area of expertise. With that being said, it’s definitely worth adding webinars and virtual events to your B2B digital marketing strategy.
Expand Your Reach with Co-Marketing
Now that you’ve added virtual events and webinars to your marketing must-haves, it’s time to consider how to elevate your reach. Collaborating with compatible organizations to your own can be a great way to elevate your webinars or virtual events by tapping into new, but relevant, audiences.
Plus, hosting a webinar in partnership with a complementary organization means you can add even more value to your audience by going above and beyond your specific area of expertise.
Improve The Buyer Journey With Videos
Videos are an amazing tool for getting all sorts of messages across to your audience in an engaging, easy-to-understand way. When used effectively, they can drastically improve the buyer journey by providing a much more detailed look at the product or service you are offering. In fact, according to Google 55% of people search for a product on Google, and then learn more by going to YouTube before they buy it.
Not only can videos help your audience better understand your products or services, but they can also have a huge impact on your SEO. Search engines love video and value it as high-quality pieces of content. In 2021, it’s estimated that over 80% of all web traffic will consist of video.
B2B Digital Marketing Trend #2: Be Authentic, Educational & Informative
Customers are inundated with messages every day, so being authentic and adding real educational value will help you cut through the noise and create a strong connection with your audience. Use your content to capture interest and establish your organization as a source of reliable information, and stay consistent with the value you provide to your audience.
The following content types are a great way to provide educational content and generate leads at the same time:
Whitepapers – creating technical, in-depth whitepapers on a specific topic can enforce your organization as a thought leader in your area, establish trust among your audience, and solidify you as a go-to source of information.
Guides – help your audience get up to speed with easy to follow ‘how-to’ guides.
eBooks – easy to read and more general than whitepapers, eBooks are a great way to increase credibility and add value through educational content.
Infographics – a great way to format content and information so it’s easy to read, educational and highly shareable.
Blogging – consistent blogging can showcase thought leadership as well as drive traffic to your website.
B2B Digital Marketing Trend #3: Nurture Leads with Email Marketing Nurtures & Automation
If you haven’t already moved your email marketing to an automated platform, we should probably be catching you up on marketing in 2011 rather than now!
Transitioning to an email automation platform (our favourites are MailChimp and HubSpot) can be one of the most highly impactful marketing investments you can make, with substantial ROI for years to come. It will make staying in touch with your contacts easier than ever and allow you to keep them engaged with relevant and personalized content.
Email Nurture Flows
Use your email automation platform to take your contacts on a journey depending on their interest group. For example, if you gained a contact because they registered to join a webinar, you will know the subject area that they are interested in. Moving forward, you can nurture this contact with relevant information that adds value to them within this area and tie in your product or service offering in a way that’s relevant to their individual needs.
Automated Email Follow Up
Reach out to new contacts instantly with automated email follow-ups. Setting up auto-responders to download, sign up or other forms allow you to automatically reach out to new contacts with the information they need without delay. This will allow you to get a higher response from your audience, as when they complete a significant action like filling in a form they will likely expect a response or confirmation.
Consistent Email Communications
To get the most from your email list, it’s important to keep your contacts engaged and remain consistent over time. A great way to do this is by sending a monthly newsletter to your contacts to keep them updated on what is new & noteworthy with your organization, and to share any new resources that may be helpful to them. A monthly newsletter provides the opportunity for you to touch base with leads, showcase your business and keep your database up to date.
B2B Digital Marketing Trend #4: Reinvest in Search Engine Marketing for the Long-Term
When it comes to SEO, it is a common misconception that if you optimize your website once then it will last forever. The reality is interest changes, and so do keywords. For example, in the Microsoft space, “Office 365” rebranded to “Microsoft 365” or “Microsoft Dynamics NAV” is now “Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central”.
It’s important to keep checking back in on your keywords and your keyword strategy, as it’s not guaranteed that they will get more popular with time. This coming year, check back in on your SEO with the following crucial stages:
Revisit Your Website Keyword Strategy
Keywords are at the heart of website SEO, so it’s important to clearly define the keywords that have the most relevance and potential for your organization.
To build an effective keyword strategy, start by conducting thorough keyword research using tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Moz or Ahrefs. Use the keyword data gathered in this research stage to guide how you will use individual keywords and how you will track their impact going forward.
Conduct a Thorough SEO Audit
How is your current site performing in terms of SEO? The best way to check what is working and what isn’t is to complete a thorough SEO audit of your site. It’s important to look out for both big issues that may be holding your site back, as well as smaller, easy-to-fix problems that may present opportunities for quick wins.
An SEO audit should cover an analysis of current organic search traffic using Google Search Console and Google Analytics, a content audit and content gap analysis, as well as examining what content (whether that’s written copy, images, or videos) is optimized and what still needs to be.
Book an SEO Audit Today!
Not sure where to start with your website SEO? Don’t panic, Maven Collective Marketing’s expert team is here to help you!
Last but definitely not least, it’s time to fill in the gaps highlighted in your SEO audit. We recommend building a checklist for each page, article, or blog post, so you have a comprehensive list of all the elements that need optimizing. It can be time consuming, but ensuring that all your headings, images and copy are optimized for search will drastically improve how easy it is for potential customers to find you online.
B2B Digital Marketing Trend #5: Explore New SERP Opportunities
Search engine algorithm updates happen all the time which means there are constantly new opportunities to improve your ranking. Take advantage of rich snippets and structured data markup to take that coveted ‘position zero’ on search engine listings – the most sought after spot on the internet.
Schema Markup
Schema markup is a section of code that you put on your site in order to help search engines serve users with an informative response to best answer their questions. Essentially, schema markup provides search engine algorithms with context to inform what your data means rather than simply what it says.
Rich Snippet Categories
The majority of Google search results show a website’s title tag, meta description and URL. Rich snippets include these, but also adds more to it making your site more compelling and increasing CTR. Search engines like Google will pull this rich snippet data from Structured Markup (like Schema) in your website’s code.
Leveraging Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free service that provides insights to help you measure your site’s performance, flag potential issues and control how Google views your website.
It’s a great tool to monitor and improve your SEO as it can show you invaluable data insights such as how often your site appears in Google search queries and which keywords drive the most traffic to your site. If you haven’t already, setting up Google Search Console should be high up on your to-do list!
B2B Digital Marketing Trend #6: Promote in the Right Channels Consistently
There are countless platforms you could use to market your organization, but it’s important to pinpoint the most important ones for you so you can stay focused on connecting with your audience in the right place at the right time. If you don’t you may find yourself spending an endless amount of time without any measurable results.
Here are the key channels we recommend focusing on:
Email Marketing
As mentioned earlier in this post, email can be a very personal way to reach your target audience. When planning your email strategy, think about how you can create a personalized experience for your contact list so that every communication is relevant to their individual interests and goals.
B2B Social Media
In our experience working with B2B companies, a lot of organizations struggle to get into a routine with social media marketing, or even ignore it completely. When used effectively, social media marketing can present a number of opportunities for your organization so make sure it is a key part of your B2B digital marketing strategy!
The key is to understand where your audience is showing up online, and focus your social media efforts on a couple of key channels rather than stretching yourself across all platforms without much in the way of engagement or return. For B2B digital marketing, our favourite platforms are LinkedIn and Twitter, but don’t overlook the value of Google My Business!
Paid advertising is an excellent way to expand your reach, grow brand awareness, and drive new leads to your site or landing page. Depending on your goals, you can run paid advertising campaigns on search engines such as Google or Bing, social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter, or you could even run an audio advertisement on a podcast that’s relevant to your offering.
When set up and optimized correctly, paid ads can be a very budget-friendly option to drive traffic and convert leads. However, as with all areas of digital marketing, it’s important to take a strategic approach and clearly understand who you are trying to reach to get the best return on ad spend.
Co-Marketing
Simply put, co-marketing is when two or more companies come together to promote an event or co-branded offer. By leveraging the relationship between your own organization and an aligned organization, you can experience the mutual benefits of expanding your brand awareness across a much larger, combined audience. This can deliver new leads and grow awareness of your product or service offering, with the added benefit of sharing the workload with another team!
Guest Blogging/Appearances
Guest blogging can present a number of benefits for your organization. You can establish yourself as a thought leader within your industry and expand your reach to a completely new audience. Plus, it can be a great way to build backlinks to your own site from high-authority, high-traffic sites in your field. When getting started, make sure you do your due diligence to ensure that the sites you are guest blogging to align with your brand, have a high domain authority, and are reputable within your field.
B2B Marketing Trends & Beyond
B2B digital marketing trends are ever-changing, but if you keep on top of them then you will be able to uncover countless opportunities to expand your reach and grow your business.
We hope these B2B digital marketing trends will help you keep your digital marketing strategy current through this next year, and beyond. But, if you need some extra help, our expert team is here to help.
Find out more about how Maven Collective Marketing can revolutionize your B2B digital marketing by getting in touch at maven@mavencollectivemarketing.com.
We’ve all heard the phrase: “if you build it, they will come.” But if no one knows where it is, how will they get there?
It used to be enough to create quality content, but if content promotion isn’t a key part of your content marketing strategy, the only engagement you are likely to get is a thumbs up from your mother. And while we appreciate kudos from family, that doesn’t usually turn our posts or pages into high-traffic, lead-generating machines.
In the world of online marketing and content marketing, content promotion acts as the road that gets visitors to arrive at our destination. So, how do we get people to show up?
Back to the Basics: SEO & Content Marketing
It goes without saying—SEO isn’t optional, it’s a mandatory part of the process. According to Ahrefs, over four million blog posts are published every single day. To help yours stand out from the crowd, there are some important on-page tactics to employ as part of your content marketing strategy:
Use strategic keywords in HTML elements such as title tags, meta descriptions, heading tags, and alt text.
Create relevant and well-written content that is optimized for short and long-tailed keywords.
Ensure page URLs are simple, well-formatted, and incorporate keywords.
Optimize page load speed on mobile and desktop devices (this can be as simple as limiting large video and image files).
Don’t Wait for Indexing
A common misconception is that as soon as a post goes live, Google will immediately crawl your website, index your content, and voila! A flood of visitors will find themselves knocking at your door. While it’s a nice thought, it likely won’t happen.
It can take up to three months (sometimes more) for Google’s bots to find new pages—unless you re-index your website after every new addition (still, please don’t wait for indexing).
Include Organic Content Promotion in Your Content Marketing Strategy
Once you’ve written high-quality content, optimized for SEO, and published to your website, it’s time to shout your new content from the rooftops. Organic content promotion is used to amplify the visibility and effectiveness of your content or marketing campaigns.
Unlike paid promotion, it doesn’t involve spending money on advertisements or boosting posts. There are several ways to include organic content promotion within your content marketing strategy, but here are five that can yield the most significant results.
Content Promotion with Email Marketing
Email marketing is a powerful way to spread the word. There are loads of great software solutions for marketing automation to help you send targeted campaigns. Begin by identifying the segment(s) of your list that would be most interested in your latest content.
A/B test your subject lines and CTAs to see what resonates. Add a little personalization for good measure, [FIRST NAME]. And do some research on your personas to find out what day of the week and time is best to hit SEND.
Always remember to test your emails on different devices and mail clients before circulating to ensure nothing breaks.
Content Promotion with Social Media
Social media marketing is a necessary component of an effective content promotion strategy. While you likely aren’t active on all of the different social media platforms, it’s safe to assume your brand probably engages with Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and/or LinkedIn. Here is a useful tip for each:
Instagram: Hashtags are like signposts, but using too many can appear spammy. Wrap your hashtags in “[…]” to hide from followers while still appeasing Instagram’s algorithm.
Twitter: Hashtags are also relevant on Twitter, but even more so is building authentic relationships with your audience. Think of Twitter as a telephone rather than a megaphone.
Facebook: It may be tempting to ask viewers to like, comment, or share your content, but Facebook views these explicit requests as click-bait. With their transition to focusing on meaningful interactions, click-bait is seen as spam and the antithesis to providing value for users.
LinkedIn: The more people you can get your content in front of, the better. Tag team members or friends in your network to encourage dialogue and sharing.
An additional tip for all social media platforms: You can craft multiple social posts from one piece of content. Repromote by using different snack-size bites, such as sound clips, videos, or quotes.
Content Promotion with Backlinks
One of the most important ways to improve the search ranking for your content is to build backlinks. When a high-ranking site links to your content, search engines see that as a “vote of confidence” and elevates its importance in their results.
Backlinks can be notoriously challenging to obtain, but guest blogging, answering questions on Quora and Reddit, or pushing out a PR campaign are a few great, no-cost options to organically promote content and build brand awareness.
Content Promotion with Schema Markup
Technical SEO tactics were once enough to show search engines the value of your content, but not since the advent of semantic search. Structured data markup is a type of in-page code that enables Google, Yahoo, and Bing! to crawl, organize, and understand the information in a similar way people do.
When implemented correctly, structured data markup can enhance your site’s search results leading to rich cards, carousels, and interactive features. These elements increase the findability of your content and make them more appealing to potential visitors as they wade through millions of returned results.
Content Promotion in Online Communities
Most social media platforms offer opportunities for professionals or people with similar interests to form online communities—think, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter Chats.
Joining these groups as an active member can be a great way to share your content and drive strong, relevant traffic. The key here is to be an active member, not just a content pusher. Adding true value to the conversation will yield higher results than dropping in just to push your own agenda.
Need Help Content Marketing Strategy and Content Promotion?
You invest a lot of time and resources in creating valuable content. Using some or all of the tools recommended above will not only tell visitors where you live but also pave the road for getting them there.
If you’ve tried the tactics above and didn’t see a measurable difference or want additional guidance on organic content promotion, Maven Collective Marketing is here to help. We drive web traffic, build audiences, and specialize in SEO content creation and promotion for B2B software and software service companies. Get in touch to find out how we can produce meaningful and measurable ROI for your business together.
Many have predicted that remote work will one day become the norm, and most companies have some experience with remote workers, but we’ve never before experienced the level of remote work that COVID-19 has made necessary over the past couple weeks. With remote working arrangements being forced on us now, many organizations are scrambling to… Continue reading Remote Work Tools to Help Ease The Transition to Working From Home
No better time than now to equip yourself with the best marketing tools to create (and execute) an even stronger marketing strategy for your B2B organization..
But with so many emerging trends, where should B2B marketers turn their attention? This post will take you through the top B2B digital marketing trends you can’t ignore in the year ahead.
1. Increase Use of Interactive Content for Result Drive B2B Marketing
Have you noticed more interactive content on the internet lately? If you have, it’s no coincidence. According to the Content Marketing Institute, the number of interactive posts has increased by 33%. And this will continue to grow as the years progress.
In the saturated content landscape, it’s hard to make static content stand out anymore – let alone connect on an emotional level with consumers. Interactive content is considerably more effective at grabbing people’s attention. In fact, 66% of marketers reported greater audience engagement after using interactive content, according to the Content Marketing Institute.
Aren’t sure what type of interactive content would work best for your industry? Try using Buzzsumo. Search your topic and add keywords like “interactive” or “quiz” to see what has worked for other businesses.
It’s up to B2B marketers to start providing more engaging interactive content as part of their content marketing strategy.
2. Employee Advocacy is the NEW Influencer Marketing
Tapping into the influential power of your employees should be a consideration for all brands – especially since we have kissed goodbye to the assumption that having a high-profile influencer equals instant credibility (and is worth the investment).
Employee re-shares of company-posted content not only generates more reach, but it’s shown to have more than double the click-through rate of the original post. Plus, employee-shared content is seen as more authentic, and therefore more likely to inspire action.
Employees often have more connections than their employer has followers. Since this is the case, employees can easily act as “influencers” and help spread their company’s message to increase online reach.
The takeaway? Encourage employees to share company-sponsored content, as well their own company-related content, to achieve the expanded reach and consideration you are looking for.
3. Digital Events & LIVE on Social Media
Most marketers believe event marketing is the most effective channel for achieving business goals – and they’re not wrong. However, events no longer need to be in-person in order to be effective. Integrating digital events into your B2B marketing strategy can also be lucrative for generating leads and accelerating your sales pipeline.
Virtual events in B2B marketing are a powerful alternative to in-person events
Virtual events are quickly becoming a mainstream form of event for B2B companies. Full-scale live events can be costly, and justifying the expenses associated with travel to an international event can be difficult. Virtual events alleviate both obstacles and provide the ultimate convenience for attendees who can join from anywhere on a laptop.
Event streaming and live Q&As on social media present a big opportunity for B2B marketers
Going live on social media should be another consideration part of your content marketing plan. Social media sites like Facebook are prioritizing live stream video content, meaning live content is less likely to get lost in the sea of regular posts and videos.
Additionally, Facebook wants more users to go live: “Live” is currently the first option in the status bar and sometimes you’ll receive notifications of when someone you follow goes live. With this extra push from Facebook, your company should be considering the live option to stream an event or run a live Q&A session.
4. Chatbots & Messaging Apps are the Future of B2B Marketing
The conversation has become increasingly digital in our daily routines, and this has quickly spilled over into B2B marketing. Chatbots have taken their place as the customer communication channel of choice, and they are giving rise to more personalized customer experiences.
According to Twilio, 66% of consumers prefer to reach brands through messaging apps. Chatbots connect people to the help and resources they need faster than ever before, proving to be a cost-effective and convenient way to communicate.
Savvy B2B marketers are increasingly using messaging apps and chatbots to meet their conversational marketing needs.
In fact, 100,000 bots are already available within Facebook Messenger. With the growth of Facebook Messenger, the launch of chatbots, and Messenger’s codes and plug-ins available to improve interactions, messaging has become the fastest-growing channel for branded conversations worldwide.
If you’re not on board with chatbots and messaging apps yet, you’re already falling behind.
5. Artificial Intelligence for More Productive in B2B Marketing
A recent survey of marketers identified AI as the technology they are most likely to implement.
The reason for this is two-fold: today, prospects are expecting more personalized engagement throughout their customer journey than ever before, and there is more data available to inform those strategies. As a result, manual analysis of data and marketing best practices just doesn’t cut it anymore – prospects want more relevant and compelling engagement.
Artificial intelligence is the solution to this. It can help B2B marketers determine the best time and place to engage with prospects based on past performance and the information already collected about that prospect. AI can help deliver higher value to prospects by applying machine learning to the content selection and delivery process in order to further personalize their customer journey. It can even help B2B marketers predict outcomes like campaign performance, conversion rates, revenue, and customer value.
AI is more than just hype. It can make a fundamental change to the productivity and efficiency of your B2B marketing strategy.
6. The Race to “Position Zero” in B2B Search Engine Marketing
Position zero is the featured snippet of text at the top of the Google search results page, just after the ads.
Despite being the most sought after spot on the internet, only 12% of search queries include position zero in their search results – presenting a huge opportunity for your marketing strategy.
So how can you ensure your content ranks in position zero? Assuming your content is good enough to rank organically on the first page of search results, you then need to optimize your content for the specific question it answers. Depending on the question, you can use text, lists, images, and even videos to inform your audience. Encourage users to learn more by creating teasers for your answers so that they are more likely to click through to your website.
Remember, Google is looking for the best answer. That means the relevance of the content will outweigh its ranking (once in the top 10) when it comes to the sought after position zero.
B2B marketers already know that position zero is the holy grail of SEO. A recent study from HubSpot found that when their content ranked for position zero, it generated a 114% increase in click-through-rates, even in cases where they already had the top organic placement.
B2B Marketing Trends & Beyond
Digital marketing has one consistency: it is ever-changing. In order to stay current, it’s important to adopt new technology, fail forward, and test what works for your business. Which strategies will you try to implement?
Need help with your B2B Digital Marketing Strategy?
Successful B2B marketing is constantly shifting, iterating, and adapting to reach your goals. Want to stay ahead of the game? Get in touch at maven@mavencollectivemarketing.com
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