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.

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 -