We hope this email finds you, your family and your colleagues in good health. 

Like you, we are managing disruption and uncertainty resulting from the Coronavirus.

Rest assure, the BayCreative team continues to be committed to providing you with ongoing services during this time. We are “open for business” and operating at full capacity, but working remotely and not making any in-person meetings during the Coronavirus outbreak.

We wish you and your loved ones the best of health. Please let us know how we can support you.

It seems like every day there’s a new social media channel the kids are gathering on. TikTok, Lasso … plenty of others I’m too old to know about. For B2B marketers, it’s a lot simpler, thankfully—we still rely on the proven “old-school” methods, according to the new report from HubSpot that looks at 2020 marketing trends.

According to the 3,400 marketers surveyed, websites are still the channel most frequently used for marketing. But websites have something in common with social media: It’s only as good as the content you put on there. For B2B businesses, that means you need to be constantly updating your blog, or adding new videos, thought leadership pieces, eBooks, white papers, infographics, or customer success stories. Not only will that new content make you more likely to be found by search engines, it will also give audiences a reason to visit your site.

Updating content takes time, though, as we know from our experience developing content for our clients at Cisco, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Twitter, Google and more! If you don’t have the internal expertise and resources, BayCreative can help. With BayCreative, you get an entire team of experienced writers, designers, editors, videographers, illustrators and marketers who are experts at content creation for websites. We love helping B2B companies achieve their marketing goals. If we can help you, just let us know.

The BayCreative team is making progress in transitioning our systems and service offerings from "Good to Great." We’re taking the time to fully understand our client’s business goals, needs and values, and then we identify the most effective marketing strategies to deliver a final product that exceeds expectations.

Sometimes it means answering challenging questions, and one we know our clients float around the water cooler a lot is "should I hire a digital marketing agency for this project?"

Regardless of the size or effectiveness of your marketing team, from time-to-time you will probably need to bring in some help from outside. Maybe it's just for a little design support, a large specialized project like a website, or maybe you need a full-service digital marketing partner.

Our eBook "10 Steps to Successful Outsourced Marketing" will help you make key decisions, and guide you through some of the more important aspects of finding, hiring and working with a digital marketing agency.

• 10 of the most important steps to a successful outsourced marketing engagement
• How to get the best results from your digital marketing agency
• Check list: "should I outsource my marketing?" 

Download the eBook and let us know if you find that it helps bring some perspective on resource allocations for upcoming initiatives.

I hope you're off to a productive week!

As mentioned in my previous email, the BayCreative team is taking our systems from "Good to Great." That’s why we’re sending out a few email notifications: We wanted to let you know about this change and what it means to you.

It means we’ll be sending you educational content that we’ve developed and that I believe can help you do your job more efficiently. (And there’s no charge for these resources, of course!)

For example...

I'm obsessed with planning, and we often collaborate with our clients at the beginning of each month to map out their marketing/branding/creative initiatives for the month ahead. We’ve created a "Monthly Marketing Goals/Activities Template" that helps us in that process, and I think you’ll find it helpful, too. Feel free to download it for your own use, and let us know if you find that it helps you get more done during the month.

It’s Scott and Arne with BayCreative.

2019 was an exciting and successful year here. Business is booming, and we’ve hit several significant milestones. But that’s never really good enough, is it? After all, in business, if you’re not moving forward, you’re falling behind.

So we’re building on our momentum by investing heavily in BayCreative. We’re putting new systems and processes in place to bring you a higher level of educational content and marketing/branding/creative service offerings than ever before.

If you’ve read Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great, you’ll have a good idea of what we're talking about. If you haven’t, we highly recommend it.

One of the new systems is the ability to send out world-class educational content about not only BayCreative and some of the client success stories, but also industry-related topics that we think will help you keep your business moving forward.

Over the next week you’ll get a few emails from us, which is just a sample of the high-value, free content we have to offer. So be looking for those in your inbox. we think you’ll enjoy them.  And, if you haven't done so yet, we encourage you to join our LinkedIn Group "B2B Marketing Innovation: Content Strategies for Increasing Growth" and engage with like-minded B2B marketers.

At BayCreative, we constantly focus our work on providing the highest quality of a full-fledged B2B marketing, branding and creative services for our clients that aims at delivering successful outcomes.

We know our clients want results, and we strive to meet them. We are honored that our drive to support our clients has been recognized as we have been ranked 83rd on Clutch’s Global Top 1000 Companies 2019 list.

Clutch is an independent Washington DC-based B2B reviews platform that receives client feedback from former projects and uses that to build a ranking system in various fields for business needs. With around 160,000 companies listed on their site, the BayCreative ranking is notable in that it places us within the Top 1% of their entire company list.

“We are thrilled to be selected by Clutch as one of the leading B2B marketing agencies in San Francisco.” - Scott Danish, President & Co-Owner.

“Without the feedback from our clients, we would not be receiving this honor. We are extremely thankful for their generous comments, and are grateful that they were as satisfied with the experience as much as we appreciated working with them.” – Arne Hurty, Founder & Chief Creative Officer.

Below is one of the many verified reviews on our Clutch profile that outlines the client experience.

Clutch also maintains a sister site, The Manifest, on which BayCreative is ranked within the Top 25 branding companies in San Francisco (December 2019). The Manifest helps find companies the solutions providers who will be best for their needs based on data-based content and expert guidance.

Marketing is key to the success of any business in today’s digital age. Without proper marketing plans and strategies, businesses could be finding themselves in a place with a lack of growth and progress. We want to make sure our clients stay on top of it all and find real outcomes and reach their goals with the aid of our marketing services.

If you are interested in working with BayCreative, please go ahead and contact us – we would love to talk more!

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.

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

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 -