In the comprehensive 11th Annual Content Marketing Survey recently conducted by Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and MarketingProfs, only 31% of respondents said that their organization had been "very successful with content marketing."

Why is successful content as rare as it is?

Business trends have changed enormously in the last year. So has the customer journey. The environment for successful communication has deteriorated, and the importance of successful content marketing has skyrocketed.

The pandemic has simply changed everything. 

So let us get to the point! What are successful marketers doing? Download the full study... or simply check out our three key take-aways (below.)

3 Key Take-Aways

1. Top Performers are Making Sure Their Content is Reaching the Right Audience!
   
   When attempting to optimize your marketing campaigns, measurement is your best ally. It is crucial to use key performance indicators (KPI) because they will afford you absolute clarity in seeing the effectiveness of your current campaign.
   
   When you can measure and analyze your level of success, you’ll be able to adjust your spending to increase visibility or modify/replace content that isn’t connecting with your audience.
   
   
2. Write Blog Articles and Follow an Editorial Calendar.
   
   Blogging and following a publishing schedule is an excellent way to build brand awareness and increase organic traffic.  Writing articles that provide relevant and valuable content to your target audience is a perfect way to create more possibilities for customers to interact and for you to develop and nourish strong relationships.
   
   The editorial calendar gives you many advantages. First, a well-received piece of content becomes an asset that will help drive new business. You’ll be creating content regularly, which will allow you to send your well-received content to new potential prospects. Remember, companies who reach out to you are looking for a solution, and sending potential customers valuable information will help establish you as an industry leader.
   
   
3. The Organization's Content Marketing is Sophisticated and Mature
   
   Intelligent content creation will take some time to develop. To create a piece of sophisticated content, it’s necessary to have an in-depth understanding of your target audience. For example, you should know your potential customers’ pain points, the things that motivate them, their interests, and buying behaviors.
   
   Creating an accurate buying persona and leveraging that persona helps guide your team regarding appropriate messaging framework and content categories that would be most helpful for your customer.
   
   We stress the importance of understanding buying behavior. For many companies, there are windows of time in which contacting them would simply be an effort in building awareness. Building awareness is an excellent practice, and a previously produced email or free E-Book costs nothing to send out. However, we believe your plan is to make stronger connections that lead to business relationships. In that case, you’ll want to have an understanding of the appropriate time to send information for awareness and the appropriate send information combined with a sales strategy.

If you’re looking to deploy successful content marketing initiatives, BayCreative can help. We’re experts at creating virtual and digital content for B2B and have done so for clients like Salesforce, Cisco, ServiceNow, DocuSign, Palo Alto Networks, Twitter, Airship, Google, and more! 

Look at all the things that evolved in 2020 that you want to keep, change, or stop doing. Then ask yourself how you might want to change content marketing to prepare for whatever comes next. If BayCreative can help, please let us know.

Stay healthy!
-- Scott, Arne and Team BayCreative

You absolutely shouldn't stop reaching out to prospects and dormant clients just because you can’t meet with them in person. That’s why many marketers are increasing their use of virtual and digital content, according to a new report ("Marketing Impact Report: COVID-19s Effect on Marketing Priorities") published by technology media company BrightTALK.

BrightTALK has seen a 76% increase year-over-year in content for webinars, videos, and virtual events, and its research found that 79% of marketers are leveraging webinars.

But merely creating virtual and digital content isn’t enough—you need creative, original, and compelling content to cut through the increased digital noise. “There’s a greater focus on quality content,” BrightTALK states. Unfortunately, many companies don’t have the time or in-house ability to create this powerful content, according to BrightTALK’s research.

If you’re in that segment, BayCreative can help. We’re experts at creating virtual and digital content for B2B and have done so for clients like Salesforce, Cisco, ServiceNow, Palo Alto Networks, Twitter, Airship and more! If you’re looking to increase your use of webinars, videos, and/or virtual events, please let us know.

Stay healthy!
-- Scott, Arne and Team BayCreative

B2B technology buyers consult on average five resources before making a buying decision, according to “The 2020 B2B Buying Disconnect.” Those resources include product demos, vendor websites, reports, white papers, customer success stories, and blogs, along with third-party materials such as user reviews.

Companies can’t directly control content on user-review sites, but companies can—and must—produce enough of their own content to help prospects do their research. Among B2B technology vendors, websites, demos, and marketing collateral are the top tactics used to educate buyers, according to that report.

Those are just two interesting bits of data from the annual report, which seeks to take a pulse on the buying habits among companies in the technology industry. The report is from TrustRadius, a review site for business technology. I think you’ll like the report; you can download the full 64-page report here.

BayCreative brings the credibility of B2B marketing/branding/creative expertise and an impressive stable of clients. We’ve helped deploy solid marketing strategies and flawless execution time and time again for our clients, including: Salesforce, ServiceNow, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, Airship and more! 

Of course, if you need help creating the content that converts B2B technology buyers into your customers, BayCreative is here for you. Just let us know if we can help.

Stay healthy!
-- Scott, Arne and Team BayCreative

The B2B buying-decision process is increasingly complex. It involves multiple levels and multiple people in multiple roles. Those people making the decisions about a substantial purchase aptly make up the “buying center” of an organization.

Understanding the buying center and the people in it is important to shaping effective B2B marketing content. So I thought you’d find this short presentation helpful: “Inside the Mind of the B2B Buyer 2020.” The SlideShare presentation tells you who is in the buying center and gives tips for how to reach and convert them. When you get a minute, check it out. I think you’ll find its information useful.

And, of course, if you need help creating the content that converts B2B buyers into your customers, BayCreative is here to support you... just like we’ve done for our clients Salesforce, Cisco, ServiceNow, Palo Alto Networks, Twitter, Airship and more! We’re experts at creating dynamic and effective content that crafts a story about your business and defines your unique value proposition. Just let us know if we can help you.

Stay healthy!
--Scott & Arne

Stories that showcase your customers’ heroic measures to serve their customers in this challenging business environment can be especially powerful right now.

These stories can inspire your audience and highlight how, even in difficult times, your solution/product/service can play a role in helping businesses continue to meet customer demands.

No matter the size of your company, you should be telling these success stories.

It makes good business sense to spotlight your customers and your solution at all times, but especially now when the world is looking for feel-good stories.

If you’re like so many other companies right now, you may not have available resources in-house to tell those stories. The good news though is that, like you, BayCreative remains focused on serving our customers during this time, and we have the expert resources you need to tell incredible success stories (as we've done for Salesforce, Cisco, ServiceNow and many more.)

Just let us know if you need help.

The principles of good communication are the same in the virtual world as they are in-person. However, there are some key differences... and following a few simple rules can significantly improve your virtual communications.

As we all learn to work more effectively online, a number of BayCreative clients have asked for tips on how to improve their presentations and remote meetings. We shared these tips (infographic below) with them and hope they might be useful as you continue to work remotely.

Download here and share with your colleagues.

In our changing workplace, there’s some good news about conducting B2B in a virtual world. Video conferencing and webinars are right at your fingertips and the tools to deliver them are better than ever. 

But communicating with your prospects, customers, and colleagues is always a challenge even under the best circumstances. As we increase virtual communication, effective use of the medium is even more critical to doing business.

BayCreative wants to help.

We create world-class presentation decks and slides, ones that are ideally suited for virtual meetings, explicitly designed to keep people engaged when you can't count on a captive, in-person audience.

What do you need to communicate? How can BayCreative support you?

Let's get through this together.

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.