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 -

There are more than 500 million PowerPoint users and 30 million PowerPoint presentations created each day around the world. It’s a medium that B2B audiences are familiar and comfortable with, and a well-designed PowerPoint presentation will keep or recapture your audience’s attention.

Just as importantly, it’s a medium that puts presenters at ease: According to one study, 91 percent of people feel that a well-designed slide deck would make them feel more confident when giving a presentation.

The Advantages of PowerPoint

“PowerPoint presentations have a lot of advantages,” says Anne Spencer, a senior designer at BayCreative. “They have a ‘made for me’ feeling about them. Unlike a brochure, a presentation can feel like it’s been prepared for the specific meeting or occasion."

“It’s often the case a B2B executive, marketer or salesperson will find inspiration for something at the 11th hour, and it’s easy to make last-minute changes to slides because of its ‘open’ format that allows for easy edits to copy, imagery or animation," adds Arne Hurty, BayCreative's Chief Creative Officer. "And it’s a very flexible format. In the hands of a skilled designer, a PowerPoint presentation can have quality rivaling any presentation format. Even animation, when handled well, can make people forget they’re looking at a PowerPoint deck.”

The key that keeps coming up, though, is that the PowerPoint deck has to be well-designed. If your deck isn’t, you’re wasting your time.

So here are BayCreative's recommendations for creating compelling B2B PowerPoint presentations that capture and keep the audience’s attention.

Best Practices for B2B PowerPoint Presentations

• Keep is short: It’s easy, when preparing a deck, to ramble on. This is pretty natural and probably happens because people do their thinking while working on slides, essentially drafting the outline of what they want that slide to be instead of creating the actual slide. It’s important to edit back and be cognizant of the talk track that’s going to happen. You don’t need everything that’s being said to appear on the slide. Sometimes a simple image is the best way to accompany all that’s being said
• Keep it legible: In keeping with simple, consider how far people might be from the screen and how hard it is to read small type or see small images. Usually people are sitting pretty close to screens when working on slides, and it’s easy to forget how hard it might be to see that same copy from a distance
• Build around company messaging: PowerPoints should be in lockstep with all your most current messaging, visual ID, and campaign work
• Play off the speaker: The speaker is the star of the show and the PowerPoint is there to make them look good. The goal is rarely to have the audience staring at presentation slides during most of a presentation. Make slides that compliment what’s being said
• Consistency: You want to avoid a presentation looking like it was cobbled together from a bunch of other presentations. Have a consistency in design and style throughout a presentation; a theme or graphical continuity that carries through. There are a million ways of doing this, with color, fonts, imagery
• Thoughtful animation: Watch a movie or a show on TV. Notice the transitions from scene to scene. In almost every case, they are either abrupt changes of scenes or very quick fades. You don’t see scenes flying as a grid or spinning around to reveal themselves. Nor does it make sense to do that in your PowerPoint. Think about what’s going to serve best. A fancy transition is making more of a point about the transition than it is about the slide being transitioned to
• Keep it current: Update your slide as necessary, but especially when there’s some kind of a trigger—such as new messaging, new products, new executive hired, new competition, new event, or new industries you’re trying to penetrate

Give Power to Your Message—and Get Help If You Have Limited Resources

PowerPoint is tremendously flexible and portable, which makes it an effective marketing tool. It works for everything from small, intimate, sales presentations, to keynotes at large conferences and is a great tool for self-running presentations, either sent to people directly in email (because file sizes are small) or run at a tradeshow.

By following the best practices we've laid out, you can create great B2B PowerPoint presentations that look professional. Or, BayCreative can help you do it (here are some examples of our PowerPoint work).

Executives, marketers and sales reps often have too much on their plates to devote the time and resources necessary to build and maintain truly effective PowerPoint presentations. That’s where outside help like BayCreative can come in handy. If you need help creating outstanding PowerPoint presentations, please let us know.

 All the best,
- Team BayCreative -

The math is simple...

The more leads you have on qualified B2B prospects for your product, service or solution, the more customers you’ll end up with. That’s why 85% of B2B marketers say lead generation is their most important content marketing goal, and why 53% of marketers say half or more of their budget is allocated to lead gen.

By “lead generation,” we specifically mean cultivating the names and contact information of people and businesses who have shown interest in your product/service/solution. Once in place, lead generation campaigns allow you to fill out your sales funnel with qualified leads with little active effort on your part. Instead, you can you focus on converting those new prospects into customers.

Cultivating those leads takes time, but there is a straightforward method for doing so.

How B2B Lead Gen Works: An Overview.

An effective lead gen campaign is built around an offer of something of value to the prospect, such as a white paper or webinar that tells them how to solve a common problem. You create the piece, post it or the information for accessing it on a landing page on your website, and then post ads and send out emails and sales letters spreading word about the offer.

When the interested prospect signs up to access the material, they provide you with their contact information. Your sales team can then maintain contact with those prospects and gently move them down the sales funnel.

The Foundation of Any B2B Lead Generation Campaign is the All-Important Offer

The offer (sometimes called a "magnet") must hold some value for your prospects to convince them to share their contact information. After all, nobody enjoys getting sales calls, so they’re not going to just hand you their phone number or email address for nothing.

So your offer has to be informative and narrowly tailored to your prospects. Give them something they can use right now, and if it happens to be connected to your product, that’s great. (It should definitely connect with your product/solution/service. Don’t give them a baseball card price guide if you sell CRM software.)

What Content Will Work Best for Your Lead Gen Offer?

Some formats perform better than others at converting leads; it all depends on your audience. What would they prefer—an eBook or a webinar? A white paper or an online demo?

According to Hubspot, here are the types of offers that generate the most amount of leads, in order of performance:

• eBooks or guides that explain how to do or accomplish something or that walks the audience through a process
• Templates or presentations that make their job easier, lay out a step-by-step process, or provide them with a script
• Research and special reports, which are more educational and are especially popular among service companies
• White papers that have a topic of high interest to prospects. These are frequently about a new technology, recent innovation, or a new way of doing something
• Kits, which are really multiple offers packaged together. These often include a brochure, video card or CD with a demo, customer success stories, technical specs, and more. These work best with prospects who already know your company
• Live webinars and on-demand videos, which are really a white paper or special report done in an instructional format

It’s important to test different types of offers with your audience to determine what works best for your company.

How to Get Your Lead Gen Campaign Done

63% of marketers say their top challenge is generating enough traffic and leads. That’s partially because they don’t have the internal resources to devote to it: 61% of B2B marketers report that a lack of resources such as staff, funding, and time is the biggest obstacle to successful lead gen efforts.

At BayCreative, we can provide you with the expert resources for a successful lead generation campaign that targets the right audience with the right content. If you’re ready to fill your sales funnel with qualified prospects, please just let us know. 

All the best,
- Team BayCreative -

Since 1998 BayCreative has served as a trusted digital partner to some of the best brands in the U.S. and beyond, providing a full suite of marketing, creative and branding services. With the rise of social media and other digital platforms, the cultural significance of brands has never been higher, with good brands having a staying power like never before. The services BayCreative provides allows businesses and organizations to elevate their brands to praise and success, and they have earned us some praise ourselves.

Our agency is pleased to share that independent research firm Clutch has just named BayCreative as an industry leader among brand consultants in San Francisco. Clutch is a B2B ratings and reviews platform that uses data-driven research and client reviews to help businesses make more meaningful partnerships. After being the subject of this research, BayCreative was ranked among the leading 15 agencies, out of almost 400 of the top branding firms in San Francisco.

"Although we have Clutch analysts to thank for this recognition, we owe most of it to our extraordinary clients," notes Arne Hurty, the agency's Chief Creative Officer and Founder. 

According to Clutch, the most important factor they consider when evaluating firms is what the agency's clients have to say about them, and BayCreative clients have delivered! Hurty continues, "more than 20 BayCreative clients have shared their stories of working with us, and as a result we have an outstanding rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars."

Although we have received a large amount of feedback, we were struck by the words of one of our clients. When asked what they found impressive about BayCreative, they responded by saying:

“BayCreative demonstrates excellent listening, flexibility, a clear sense of design, and a knack for creative problem-solving. The team works closely with us to accommodate changes to the statement of work and never turns down a request.”

Scott Danish, BayCreative President and Co-owner, reflects "We strive to be a valuable partner on every project we complete, and reviews like this let us know that we are hitting our mark. We appreciate this opportunity to keep track of how we are performing for our clients, and we cannot wait to see what else they have to say about us."

BayCreative may have been recognized by Clutch as a 2019 Top Branding Industry Leader, but the quality of our full suite of digital marketing and creative services has also been commended. We are excited to be featured as one of the top digital agencies in San Francisco on "The Manifest." The Manifest is a sister-site to Clutch, and serves as a resource for small to midsize firms, providing industry insights and how-to guides. In addition, BayCreative garnered recognition over the past two years from Clutch as a: Top California Service Provider, a Top Digital Agency, a Top Video Production Company, a Top Ad & Marketing Agency and Top Web Designer.

Danish adds "the BayCreative team is proud to receive this praise, but we recognize that we did not earn it alone. Thank you to all of our amazing clients... we absolutely could not have done this without you. If you are pleased with the work we have done for you, feel free to submit your own BayCreative review on Clutch. And if you are looking to elevate your brand and your business, don’t hesitate to drop us a line. These first two decades have been kind to BayCreative, and we cannot wait to see what the next few hold for us!"

All the best,
- Team BayCreative -

Beating the bushes for new clients can be disheartening. You make calls and constantly get voicemail. Send emails and a majority go unopened. Follow up and get ignored. Make a fabulous offer… and get ignored some more. You pay for a display ad in a trade publication and hope the right people happen to see it at the right time.

There’s an easier, less expensive, and more effective way to consistently fill your sales funnel with targeted prospects: B2B inbound marketing.

According to Demand Metric, inbound marketing generates three times more leads than traditional methods—and costs 62 percent less. So it seems like a worthwhile addition to your B2B marketing program. 

What is B2B inbound marketing? And why is it effective?

Why B2B Inbound Marketing Works

HubSpot coined the phrase “inbound marketing” in 2006. It means using a combination of relevant, informative content in various channels to increase your brand’s reach and draw people to your website, landing page, or tradeshow booth rather than outwardly pushing your brand, product, or service onto prospects. You attract people’s attention, engage with them, convert them to customers, and then delight them with more useful content.

It’s effective because by offering your audience something of interest and value, you’re cutting through their innate skepticism of advertising. If fact, it’s like you’re not even advertising at all. Rather, you’re communicating and helping them, and that difference can be powerful. You’re building trust, credibility, and momentum with your prospects and customers. 

Most Successful B2B Inbound Marketing Channels

The key to a successful inbound marketing program is to create content specifically designed to appeal to your targeted customers. Here are the most common channels used in inbound marketing:

• Thought leadership pieces such as white papers, eBooks, and infographics that you post on your website or present on industry websites. Those pieces of content show audience members how to do something in a new and/or better way. If the reader likes what they read, they may look around your website to learn more.
• Case studies. Here you’re showing the audience how an organization similar to their own solved a common problem—and maybe your reader will benefit from a similar approach.
• A Blog (like this one!) that offers useful, practical advice that the audience can act on.
• Videos that can take on the role of thought leadership, customer testimonials, product demos or blog posts.
• Social media campaigns that offer quick insights into trends or useful tips and tricks.
• Targeted pay-per-click campaigns on social media and online community pages that offer the promise of something relevant and useful to the viewer. It’s important that you deliver on that promise.

Inbound or Outbound? Both

An inbound marketing element can take some of the frustration and stress out of your marketing efforts by bringing prospects to you while you focus on outbound marketing efforts. That’s the key to an effective marketing strategy: It should incorporate both inbound and outbound marketing to capture the greatest number of prospects.

Lead Nurturing Accelerates the Sales Cycle

If someone choses to convert on your website (fill out a form) for certain types of content, you begin to identify at what level they are in your sales funnel. Designing and programming a series of lead nurturing workflows will help nurture these leads through the funnel over time in an automated fashion. Each month, as you add additional digital assets, these nurturing strategies get updated. It is common to have many of these campaigns running on your website.

Why?  Companies that automate marketing activity see up to a 10% revenue increase in just 6-9 months. (Source: Gartner Research).

Generally, it takes multiple touch points to successfully create a prospect. By building a relationship with a buyer, you can deliver the right content at the right time to move them to the next stage in the buying cycle. This allows you to deliver more highly qualified leads to your sales team and shorten the sales cycle when that conversation begins.

Email Marketing is Still an Efficient Way to Generate Leads at a Reasonable Cost

When you offer your website visitors useful or entertaining content, they choose to opt-in to your information by converting on your website forms. Email marketing is used to keep relationships with leads strong and to promote new content for effective lead nurturing.

Why? 50% of qualified leads are simply not ready to buy. (Source: Gartner Research)

Just because a website visitor becomes a lead doesn’t mean he or she is ready to buy. Email marketing is a great way to keep your name in front of your prospects. Moreover, one email blast can have different messages for different segments of your list. These highly targeted lists can improve your open and click-through rate, increasing engagement with a lead.

Make the Investment in B2B Inbound Marketing

Whatever mix you incorporate into your marketing efforts, you’ll need to invest either dollars or time. If you’re bandwidth is running thin and you need expert support, BayCreative can help. Please just let us know.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

From Forbes: “In order to stand out today, brands need something more. They need to focus on selectively, strategically positioning themselves as true thought leaders.”

From Neil Patel: “22 Inbound Marketing Strategies Your Startup Needs to Start Using Today”