One of the keys to attracting and converting B2B prospects is routine engagement and consistent messaging. That way, prospects become familiar with your brand and what it stands for, and when they feel like they know you, they’re more likely to listen to you.

But that engagement journey isn’t happening as effectively as it should, according to the newly released “B2B Content Marketing 2020 Report” from the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. The report examines benchmarks, budgets, and trends in North American content marketing.

Only half of the B2B marketers in the report agree their organization provides customers with optimal experiences across the engagement journey. The reasons for that can be found in the responses to other questions in the survey.

For instance, 58% of B2B marketers in the report say their organization isn’t sophisticated or mature in their content marketing. That means that more than half of organizations are still experiencing growing pains creating strategy, or measuring and scaling their efforts, or, in 4% of cases, haven’t even begun to make content marketing a process.

We can follow the breadcrumbs from another response to get a fuller explanation of why these organizations aren’t yet mature: 56% of respondents say they have one or no full-time person dedicated to content marketing. And if an organization isn’t able to dedicate the resources to content marketing efforts, they’ll naturally struggle to optimize the customer engagement journey. 

With those tiny—or non-existent—resources for creating content marketing, companies are turning to outside help: Half of the respondents said their organization outsources at least one content marketing activity, usually content creation. If you’re like nearly half of the B2B marketers in the report and your organization will prioritize improving the quality and conversion of audiences in the coming year, BayCreative can help overcome staffing shortages. Please just let us know.

We’ve talked about it before: The best way to increase your chances of marketing success is to clearly define and categorize different segments of your audience, and then create content specifically for those different segments.

If you want to go even further with your segmenting, you can create content for the individual companies you’re targeting. That’s the idea behind account-based marketing (ABM). With ABM, B2B companies concentrate sales and marketing resources on a clearly defined set of high-value target accounts.

About B2B ABM

Today’s B2B buyers insist on outreach that connects with their business interests and their personal interests within the business. With ABM, you present your brand and highly relevant, targeted content only to the most sought-after prospects. That content should draw on the prospect’s pain points and needs.

Social media isn’t just for duck-faced selfies. In fact, social media can be a valuable tool for B2B companies.

Fifty-five percent of B2B buyers search for product and vendor information on social media. And if you’re not there, they’re going to find your competition instead of you.

You’re probably not going to be able to pull a prospect all the way down your sales funnel with just social media. But it’s a valuable tool for distributing your content and promoting your business and product/solutions.

Like any other B2B marketing effort, though, you have to do it right, or you’re just wasting your time and money. So here are a baker’s dozen tips to help you maximize your B2B social media marketing efforts.

Tips for B2B Social Media

1. Post where your audience is. The first step is to choose the right social platform, the one(s) your prospects use. It’s best to start with one platform and focus your efforts on that one, and then add more as you build up your content base.
2. Study your audience demographics and develop an audience persona to help you write content specific to its pain points.
3. Continuously be adding content to your website so you have items to promote on social media. Make sure that each piece of new content offers something of value for the audience, and then play up that value element in your social media posts.
4. Remember, it’s not all about you. Sure, you want to promote your new white paper, but when you promote it, talk about why your audience would want to know about it. In all cases, think about how you can make the post about those personas you created.
5. Bring something new and different to the conversation. Get creative not only with your social media posts, but also with the content that feeds those posts. You want to stand apart from your competition, and the way to do that is by being different. 
6. Connect with or follow your prospects. Listen to what they post. Monitor what content they consume, what they share, and how they engage with brands and people. You might even be able to glean some pain points they’re experiencing.
7. Which leads us to this next point: Don’t simply follow or connect with them. Engage with them. When they ask a question of their community, try to answer. When they express frustration with a pain point, try to offer a solution.
8. Engage with your followers, as well. Respond when someone comments on your posts. Ask thought-provoking, relevant questions as a way to get them to interact with you. Follow trending hashtags in your industry; identify groups of industry experts and thought leaders; participate in conversations. That’s a great way to grow your social media community.
9. Join the social media conversation during events such as trade shows—even if you’re not there. If you use the correct hashtags, you’ll be seen even by people who aren’t connected or following you, and if they like what you have to say, maybe they’ll start following you.
10. Incorporate video to mix things up.
11. Try paid social media. That can allow you to talk to targeted prospects who aren’t in your connected community. And with PPC advertising, this approach can be surprisingly affordable.
12. Be sure to align your social media posts with sales and other internal teams, so that you’re all pushing in the same direction.
13. Track, measure, and optimize your efforts.

Become a Part of the Conversation

Social media is a part of everyday life for most people. And with a little savviness and plenty of effort, you can use that to your advantage when marketing your B2B product/solution.

If you need help creating content or managing your social media personality, let us know. BayCreative, a full-service marketing firm in San Francisco, has a team of writers who specialize in writing compelling B2B content that can drive any social media campaign. Or, if maintaining this level of social media vigilance seems too taxing on your internal resources, we can handle your social media efforts. 

Just let us know how we can help.

All the best,
- Team BayCreative -

Remember Ray Walston's character as the uptight history teacher in the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High?  He stands at the front of the class, reciting dry facts. 

Don’t be like that guy—and don’t let your audience be like these bored students. Even in a business environment, this type of dry, information-only approach doesn’t work for training sales teams and channel partners, guiding customers through smooth on-boarding, or showing prospects how to solve a problem.

If the approach you take when creating content for your B2B eLearning tutorials is a dry recitation of the processes, your audience will retain just as much information as Jeff Spicoli did that day in class. 

The result: you’ve wasted your time building the content, wasted the audience members’ time because they’ll leave just as uninformed as they entered the training, and wasted customer service representatives’ time because they’ll be forced to deal with customers and partners who are unaware of how to deploy, onboard, or use the solution.

When creating content for eLearning purposes, think back to your childhood. Just as children’s tales teach valuable life lessons with compelling stories that help children retain the story and its message, engaging stories set in the workplace can be a powerful teaching tool.

Study after study has shown that telling a story helps the audience retain more of what they’re being told. Not to mention it captures their attention and keeps them engaged. For business eTraining and eLearning situations, this means that if you can tie the lesson to a relatable business objective that resonates with the challenges the learners might be facing, you’ll capture their attention, unpack complex ideas in a meaningful way, and help them retain the information better. 

How To Build Content for B2B eLearning Programs

Training content should start with a clearly defined statement of what the audience will learn and how learning that will benefit them—otherwise, they may not care to engage in the first place. Think of that as your pitch to them. Then build the content of the course around a scenario that relates to the pain points the audience may be experiencing.

Give the content a narrative arc—a beginning, middle, and end. Introduce a main character, someone the audience would recognize from their own workday, and present his/her obstacle. Walk the audience through the problem. As you do so, be sure to relate what’s happening with the protagonist back to the learner. That shifts audience members from passive observers to active participants.

Then move on to how the protagonist solves this problem, which would be by doing what they need to with your solution to solve their pain points. Show the best practices that got him/her the desired results, and show the benefits they get from it. Conclude with a summarization of what was learned.

Include a mix of engaging text, graphics, and video, if appropriate. But be careful: You want your content to be engaging but not superfluous. Only use text, graphics, and video that support the course, and stay narrowly on that path. Don’t add needless side trips that distract from the lesson.

And remember, eLearning offers the opportunity for interactive elements. Hopeful, you get more response than that poor economics teacher.

Does Laying the Foundation Seem Like a Lot of Work? Fear Not!

By building a narrative arc into your eLearning and eTraining content, you create stories that will engage with the audience and help them remember what they learned—and what they need to do going forward. 

But creating the content for B2B training takes a lot of upfront work.

That’s where BayCreative can help. We have experts who can guide you through the process, or even take on most of the course creation themselves. If you think it might be time to take create more engaging eContent, let us know.

All the best,
- Team BayCreative -

BayCreative talks to our clients quite a bit about thought leadership. But what exactly is thought leadership, and why is that important to your B2B marketing efforts? Read on, and we’ll explain.

B2B Thought Leadership Is …

An industry “thought leader” is somebody or some company that has demonstrated knowledge of the real problems and issues plaguing their industry and have suggested solutions to those problems. You offer those examinations and solutions in free content such as white papers, presentation decks, eBooks, infographics, webinars, and videos.

Even if your suggestions aren’t universally agreed to be the best solutions, the fact that you homed in on a real problem shows that you’re plugged into the industry and the community in your industry. (Note: This only holds up if you are examining real problems, not “problems” that you’re making up to fit your product/solution.)

Just that demonstration of industry knowledge makes you credible in the eyes of those inside and outside the industry. They’ll come to trust you—as long as the thought knowledge demonstration isn’t accompanied by overt sales pitches—and that trust will transfer to your product or solution, which can help sell it when the time comes.

The Benefits of B2B Thought Leadership Content

The B2B decision-making process is complex and lengthy, with a lot of people involved. That’s another reason why thought leadership pieces are so important. When you lay out the problem and solution in a non-biased, non-salesy way that everybody involved in the process can understand and relate to, you help them gain alignment with each other, potentially hastening the buying process.

A study by Edelman and LinkedIn found that thought leadership has meaningful impact on attracting RFP invitations, creating preference with buyers, and directly contributing to increased sales. It also revealed:

• Decision-makers value timeliness and relevance of thought leadership content more than pure originality of ideas.
• However, poor-quality thought leadership piece can directly lead to lost business opportunities.
• A majority of decision-makers are disappointed in the quality of available thought leadership.

So it’s important that your thought leadership pieces speak to a real problem in the industry; offer solid, credible data to support your statements; and offer an innovative, relevant solution to the problem being discussed.

You Can Be A Leader in Thought Leadership

Whatever formats you choose for your thought leadership pieces, they’re well worth your investment. In the competitive B2B marketplace, any advantage you can gain is important.

At BayCreative, we’ve produced numerous white papers, presentation decks, eBooks, infographics and videos that demonstrate our clients’ thought leadership. And we can help you do so, too. Just let us know when you're ready to speak up.

Getting heard by B2B prospects is hard—particularly if what you’re saying isn’t significantly relevant to them and their workday. If your message is a general one, a large segment of your audience will ignore it because they have no reason to listen to it.

But if you create multiple messages, each targeted to a specific group of prospects and customers, you can craft content that makes them stand up and take notice. To do that, you need to segment your customers or market.

Customer segmentation, or market segmentation, is the division of customers and potential customers into discrete groups. Solid, relevant content mapped to well-built marketing segmentation will give you increased click-through rates and conversions from your content and offers.

Deeper Segmentation for Better B2B Marketing
Often, companies will segment the market into company characteristics, such as industry and size or economic value.

But those doesn’t really give you the information you need to craft relevant messages for the audience. Just because they share size or economic level doesn’t necessarily mean they share needs or problems. (Although, if you put size and economic value together, you may be able to sufficiently narrow the audience.)

So go deeper with your segmentation. Look at:

Even in this age of saturated inboxes and tiresome spam, email marketing is still the most effective and cost-efficient B2B marketing channel.

Why? Part of it is because people use email. They may not use LinkedIn or read that trade publication you advertise in. But nearly everyone—85% of adult Internet users in the United States—has an email account. And at least 91% of consumers check their email daily.

For comparison’s sake, only 15% of U.S. Internet-using adults use search engines, and only 22% use social media.

But also: emails convert.

People who buy products through email spend 138% more than those who do not receive email offers. According to another statistic, the ROI of email marketing is 3,800%!

So marketers, email can be a significantly valuable tool for your marketing campaigns. But only if it doesn’t get snagged in the spam filter before your prospects even see your exciting offer.

How can you maximize the chances your email will reach its intended recipients? Read on.

How Spam Filters Determine Whether or Not to Intercept Your Email

Here’s a quick primer on how spam filters work on inbox providers like Gmail and Outlook: Those services actually look at the user engagement and interactions in your past campaigns.

They use that information to build two scores:

• Your score with the individual subscriber. If that person is consistently opening your campaigns and/or moving them to folders, you’re going to build up credibility with that individual user.
• Your score with the email provider. If the majority of your Gmail subscribers, for example, are opening your campaigns and moving them to folders, you’re going to build up a positive reputation with that provider.

You’re Being Scored

Here are some factors that go into those scores:

• Whether a user frequently opens your campaigns. If they do, that’s seen as a good signal that your campaigns aren’t spam. If, on the other hand, recipients don’t open your email and delete it, that negatively impacts your score.
• Whether people respond to your email.
• If people move your email out of the junk folder or move it into various folders in their inbox. If they do that, your scores will be positively impacted; on the other hand, if they move your email to the junk folder, your score will be negatively impacted.
• If your recipients add your email address to their address book.

How to Win the Spam Filter Game

Now that we know what goes into the score, let’s look at some tips for how you can increase your scores:

• Only email people who have given you permission to email them. Don’t waste your money buying or renting lists; instead, build your own organic list by having people opt-in to your emails. Do this by clearly placing sign-up boxes on your website (and offering them a reason to give you their email address—whether that’s a free report or promises of great content in your emails).
• Use a “From” name that they would know. For instance, if the recipient signed up to receive emails from your website, use the website’s name in the “From” box, rather than, say, the CEO’s name. Chances are, they won’t know the CEO’s name and will think it’s spam.
• Use addresses that they can reply to. As mentioned, one of the signals use by email providers is whether or not you received responses to your previous emails. Make it easy for your audience to respond; don’t send the email from noreply@badmarketing.com, for example.
• As always with marketing content—send relevant content. If people enjoy your emails, they’ll open them and perhaps even reply. So make sure your content adds value for its recipients.

Get Professional Help to Ensure Your B2B Email Marketing Success

Email marketing lets you actively target the prospects you covet. But if you don’t do it right—if you aren’t able to avoid the spam filter—you’re just wasting your time and money.

A professional B2B marketing agency like BayCreative can help. We have content gurus who can create compelling, relevant content that entice your audience to open your emails. We can make it so simple, you’ll feel like you’re mailing it in.

MORE INFORMATION: “19 of the Best Email Marketing Campaign Examples We've Ever Seen.”

When you’re ready to launch an email campaign that delivers results, just let us know.

All the best,
- Team BayCreative -

We know 93% of B2B buyers find case studies and testimonials important when evaluating potential solutions. So loading up your website with case studies that target different segments of your prospect base makes good B2B marketing sense.

But you don’t have to just park your case studies on your website and wait for them to be discovered by prospects who are researching for a solution like yours. By being proactive with marketing your case studies, you can get more bang for your buck.

How To Utilize Your B2B Case Studies

Here are 8 ways you can use your case study to give it greater reach:

• Because of their applicability to specific buyer types, case studies make great resources for your sales team. These success stories give them personalized content to show prospects, making their pitch more relevant to those prospects.
• Condense the case study down into a PowerPoint (or similar) slide for quick viewing at a sales presentation. Because it’s coming from a credible source, this can be very powerful during a presentation about what your product can do for the prospect. This is a proof point that can help close the deal.
• Use them as handouts at industry events, speaking engagements, or webinars.
• Make each new case study part of your email marketing campaign, sending out a brief message highlighting the newest customer you’ve helped, with a link to the case study’s landing page.
• Have your sales staff put a (tracked) link in or under their email signature—but rather than the name of the case study, have them draw out the one big benefit the case study illustrates. For example, “Learn how ABC saved $2 million a year with our solution.”
• Pull out the meaty customer quotes and strategically use them on your website. Landing pages are a good place for those. Even better if you can use the client’s name and logo.
• And use those quotes on social media, with a link to the case study’s landing page.
• Turn the case study into a blog post. Expand on it, if possible, perhaps by bringing in someone from your organization to tell the story from their view. Or outline best practice tips learned from the client experiences. Talk about what your client learned during the process; the things the client considered before selecting a solution; and what they would recommend others know before starting the process.

Telling the Story Isn’t the End of the Story

Case studies are a powerful part of any B2B marketing campaign. But the creation of that document isn’t the end of your time with that story. Find other avenues in which to present it so that you get extra mileage out of this compelling piece.

Are you ready to brag about your product/solution a bit, but don’t feel like you have the internal resources or expertise? BayCreative, a full-service B2B marketing firm, can help. We have our own success stories in helping numerous companies tell their success stories.

... and we’d love to help you, too.

All the best,
- Team BayCreative -

In the midst of the long customer journey, short-and-sweet infographics can be a welcome change from the more text-heavy research materials.

Infographics are unique among B2B in-bound marketing content. They present relevant, critical information from white papers, eBooks, surveys, and other sources, but do it in a way that catches the eye and is much faster to consume. Infographics rely on concise, tightly written content to support images that are built around the data; the content supports the images, not the other way around, unlike in white papers and eBooks.

In a minute or two a viewer can get the point of the infographic and the supporting data, and then they can go on their way—or they can share it.

Like white papers, case studies, and eBooks, infographics are an important component of a truly effective B2B marketing campaign.

Sample infographic designed for BayCreative software client Bizagi

Why You May Want to Produce B2B Infographics

Benefits of B2B infographics marketing pieces:

1. They grab the viewers’ attention. The beautiful design, bold formatting, and condensed information catch the reader’s eye. And getting people to view your content is the most important part of any B2B marketing campaign.
2. They’re easily shared. Rather than share a link to a landing page, you can include the actual infographic in a social media post, making it more likely to be consumed. In fact, infographics are liked and shared on social media 3X more than any other type of content.
3. If done well, infographics leave your audience wanting more. Infographics offer the high points of a topic/subject—and then invite the viewer to explore the topic further by reading the other content pieces you’ve created on the subject. Infographics are a crucial part of the symbiotic relationship that should exist between your various in-bound marketing materials on a subject.
4. They build brand awareness, and that’s the name of the game with B2B in-bound marketing. Well-done infographics can establish trust, recognition, and loyalty for your brand.

How To Get Your Infographic Noticed

Producing an infographic will do little good if you don’t proactively push it out into the world. Here are some tips for how to increase the chances of your infographic getting noticed:

• Distribute a press release about it. If you tied the infographic to a timely hook—such as a holiday or a news event—the press release is more likely to get noticed by media and industry outlets.
• Have your infographic explain something that is confusing, or be a how-to guide to doing something.
• Submit the infographic to directories that showcase infographics.
• Have a social media plan for supporting your B2B content, including your infographic.
• Clearly encourage your audience to share the infographic on social media.

Creating an Infographic Takes Expertise; We Can Help

As you can see, infographics have a lot to offer your B2B marketing campaign. But creating a strong B2B infographic takes experience and skill; you need a designer who can capture the audience’s attention with graphics and illustrations and a writer who can cut to the heart of the data and present it with depth in just a few words. That’s not easy to do.

At BayCreative, though, we have writers and designers who are experts at producing infographics. And we can share that expertise for your next in-bound marketing campaign. Just give us a shout if you're interested in collaborating.

When you’re looking for a product or service, what’s the first thing you do 9 out of 10 times? Go online to google (the verb) that product/service so you can research it, get a feel for its value to you, and find out where you can buy it.

Right?

No matter if it’s in their business or personal life, people rely on the Internet to tell them the best brands of products and services. They usually start the process by googling a general term for that product/service. For B2B companies, showing up on the first page of those search results is critically important—the higher in the rankings, the better.

But if consistently addressing search engine optimization (SEO) is too time-intensive, or you don’t have the in-house knowledge to do that, or you just want to double up on the chances a prospect will find you when they’re looking for your product, you can try pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

PPC 101

PPC stands for “pay-per-click.” In simplistic terms, you create a simple text ad with targeted keywords, and when someone clicks on that ad, you pay the website a small fee. Because you’re paying money per click, the website that is hosting your ad—commonly a search engine, but not always—will place it at the top of the search results, or the top of the page, or in the “news feed.” The more you’re willing to pay per click, the higher you’ll be listed in relation to other companies that have bid on those same keywords.

The top two results are ads that match the keywords “B2B software solutions.”

The Cost-friendliness of B2B PPC Ads

Paying $1 per click, for example, may seem like a lot, but it's really not, compared to the benefits you can receive. The people who click on the ad link tend to be more qualified prospects already looking for your product/service/solution. If not, they won’t click on it, and you won’t have to pay.

If you can convert a fraction of those who click on the ad, you’ll likely make more than enough in sales to make the PPC ad investment worth it.

Because it’s (by far) the most-used search engine in the world, you’d want to focus your PPC campaign on Google Ads. You can also advertise on social media sites and blogs that target the same audience as your marketing efforts.

The Benefits of a PPC Advertising Campaign for B2B Companies

If done right, PPC advertising can offer some enticing benefits for B2B companies:

• They’re cost-effective because you’re only paying when a user clicks on your ad and goes to your landing page or website, rather than paying for the ad to run for a length of time
• You can choose how much to pay
• It’s targeted, so you can choose your audience according to demographics and interests
• You can use PPC ads on many different sites: social media, search engines, blog posts, online newsletters
• It’s measurable, so you can determine how much return you’re getting on your investment
• It’s customizable—if it doesn’t seem to be working, you can make adjustments to improve performance
• You can see the impact of your PPC efforts almost immediately

It’s Not As Easy As it Looks, Though

But, as with any effective marketing strategy, a lot goes into crafting a successful PPC campaign. You’ll need to research and select the right target groups and keywords, write a relevant ad with the keywords in the right places, and make sure the landing page that the ad leads to is optimized for conversions.

That’s where a full-service B2B marketing/branding/creative agency like BayCreative can help. We’re experts in crafting content for a variety of marketing materials, including PPC campaigns. If you’re looking to increase your leads through the use of PPC ads, please let us know.

 All the best,
- Team BayCreative -