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.

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 -