Are you emotionally moved or impressed by my effort? Probably not. Even if I used a little tech wizardry to insert your name in there, you likely wouldn’t be blown away by the level of customization. It’s just filling in a template, not creating something new.
In theory, account-based marketing (ABM) should mean delivering hyper-relevant, custom content to your most relevant accounts. In practice, however, it tends to mean coming up with ever-more intricate Mad Libs. We end up templatizing everything to scale up our efforts, losing the immediacy and relevance that makes ABM work.
Fortunately, a few practitioners out there are demonstrating how to take ABM at scale beyond the “fill-in-the-blank” model. Gary Gerber shared his tips in our first Break Free video of the new season. This time around, we’re talking to Danny Nail about the amazing work he’s doing at SAP.*
Danny is the Global Head of Account Based Marketing at SAP. Under his leadership, they’ve developed a remarkable platform for repurposing and customizing content for different regions, accounts, and even across verticals.
The system Danny and his team built is largely self-serve, and it’s cheaper and more efficient than having local offices create their own assets. The best part? You don’t need Fortune 500-level resources to create something similar for your team.
I sat down with Danny during B2BMX to talk about ABM, content marketing, and the importance of creativity in everything from content to strategy. Watch the video or listen to the audio below, and skip past the embeds for a few key highlights.
[bctt tweet=”“You have to let go of templatized old ideas…and start really digging into how you can change what you’re doing and make it more efficient, more effective, and be creative about that.” @DannyNail, @SAP” username=”toprank”]
5:00 – Solving the attribution dispute between sales and marketing
6:00 – Building measurement into an ABM platform
7:15 – Refining the definition of ABM
10:45 – Building a better ABM platform
14:00 – The power of non-promotional content
15:30 – Why Danny got into marketing
17:00 – How marketing will change in the next 5 years
18:40 – Rising above the personalized/scalable trade-off
22:35 – How can marketers break free?
Danny:
I’ve developed what I call the ABM asset delivery platform. I worked with my agency to develop that. What it is, is a library of the assets we’ve already created for our ABM program at a global level.
So think about if you have, let’s say, five accounts in oil and gas globally, and they’re across there in four different regions, but the things that you create for them are synergistic across all five accounts. So they can be used for those five accounts, they most likely are going to be usable for any other oil and gas account in the world.
So what we do is there on the platform, a seller or marketer can go onto the platform and actually order that asset to be versioned for that account. If they do it at what we call level three, it takes three to five weeks, costs 1500 euro, and they’ve got this great asset that looks like it was developed specifically for their account.
Josh:
So this is a platform that’s almost a self-serve for sales and marketing?
Danny:
Think “Amazon” for ABM assets.
Josh:
Were there any challenges that you faced trying to get ABM aligned with both sales and marketing?
Danny:
I think that the biggest challenge is the relationship with sales. Because historically, marketing and sales have kind of been at odds a bit, which is unfortunate, but ABM brings the two together.
So throughout the development of each of my programs, I work closely with the sales leads of each of the accounts within the program. They’re involved in the creation of the assets. They’re involved in the messaging that happens within the assets for their account. So they have the opportunity to, at the end of the day, tailor their assets, the things that I developed for them even more so for their specific accounts. So they know it resonates with their account.
The key to that is understanding the sales cycle. And understanding how sellers think and what they’re up against. So we know that every year there at certain times of the year they’re going to be involved in Sapphire or field kickoff meetings or end of quarter close, so we’ve got to watch out and and be cognizant of the things that the salespeople are facing, so that when we go to them and ask for their time, we’re going at a time when we know they would have time.
Danny:
When I was asked to start the industry IBM program at SAP, there were three objectives: Have global marketing, get closer to sales and create something that can be scalable. Typically, when people think of scalability, they think of templates. So the whole bill of material is templatized. White Paper, tweets, let’s have three tweets, two blogs, sets of blog copy, an email, and the white paper and maybe an infographic that comes from the white paper, right? Every program, same bill of materials. With the platform and the way we build the assets, we don’t even think about what we’re going to build until we know the story we’re going to tell. And once we know the story we’re going to tell, depending on what type of story it is, that’s when we decide what type of asset or material we’re going to build. And then that goes on to the platform. It starts as generic, but then you can have it versioned at a number of different levels.
Danny:
The things that some people are calling ABM are really target account marketing. That should be the way we market on a daily basis. We should know what the sentiment about interest and intent data is for our target accounts, we should have a set of target accounts that we’re monitoring and serving our material to when they’re ready for it and when they’re basically asking for it because they’re showing intent on it. That should be the marketing across the board.
But then that should also lead to accounts where we can do account based marketing. So the continuum should be from target account marketing, to ABM, to one-to-one ABM, all the way across that scale, but it should start with target account marketing.
So we want to be done with customized or targeted lists. If you’re going to send something to somebody, at least make it as close to industry specific as you can, so that it’s talking in their language, and it’s talking about their problems.
Because HR issues, everyone would think they’re the same. But retail has totally different HR issues than oil and gas because of seasonality. And you’ve got seasonal workers around Christmas and holidays and things like that. So you need to be able to understand that and show your customers that you understand that because that’s how they’re thinking.
Josh:
I think we have this feeling that we have limited resources. So we have to find as much of a synergy as we can between messaging and it seems like with the technology that you’re working with, you don’t have to make that trade off anymore.
Danny:
That’s right. I think that’s one of the things — I think marketers have typically — when they thought scalability, again, they thought templatized. And instead of thinking templatized, think of different ways to scale, or the way you create the material that you create to make it more scalable, as opposed to making it templatized.
Use the creative you’ve done for one thing and repurpose it for another thing. So we’ve done that with one of our assets, it’s an automotive asset. That’s where a car is driving through a village, and it’s a linear story. So the next time we had a linear story, we changed it from a car driving through a village to a person walking through a store, same asset, just repurposed so that we could get the scale of at least the programming that we had done on the back end of the asset to make the the retail asset.
Danny:
You have to let go of templatized, old ideas. You have to break free of thinking about things the way we’ve always thought about them, and start really digging into how you can change what you’re doing and make it more efficient, more effective, but be creative about that. Because the platform didn’t exist, but now it does. And that’s because we got creative about how we could scale ABM, as opposed to adding people to scale or adding money to scale.
Stay tuned to the TopRank Marketing Blog and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more Break Free B2B interviews. Here are a few interviews to whet your appetite:
Are you emotionally moved or impressed by my effort? Probably not. Even if I used a little tech wizardry to insert your name in there, you likely wouldn’t be blown away by the level of customization. It’s just filling in a template, not creating something new.
In theory, account-based marketing (ABM) should mean delivering hyper-relevant, custom content to your most relevant accounts. In practice, however, it tends to mean coming up with ever-more intricate Mad Libs. We end up templatizing everything to scale up our efforts, losing the immediacy and relevance that makes ABM work.
Fortunately, a few practitioners out there are demonstrating how to take ABM at scale beyond the “fill-in-the-blank” model. Gary Gerber shared his tips in our first Break Free video of the new season. This time around, we’re talking to Danny Nail about the amazing work he’s doing at SAP.*
Danny is the Global Head of Account Based Marketing at SAP. Under his leadership, they’ve developed a remarkable platform for repurposing and customizing content for different regions, accounts, and even across verticals.
The system Danny and his team built is largely self-serve, and it’s cheaper and more efficient than having local offices create their own assets. The best part? You don’t need Fortune 500-level resources to create something similar for your team.
I sat down with Danny during B2BMX to talk about ABM, content marketing, and the importance of creativity in everything from content to strategy. Watch the video or listen to the audio below, and skip past the embeds for a few key highlights.
[bctt tweet=”“You have to let go of templatized old ideas…and start really digging into how you can change what you’re doing and make it more efficient, more effective, and be creative about that.” @DannyNail, @SAP” username=”toprank”]
Break Free B2B Interview with Danny Nail:
Timeline and Highlights:
1:58 – A new definition for scalable ABM
2:27 – Creating a self-serve ABM platform
3:30 – Aligning sales and marketing for ABM
5:00 – Solving the attribution dispute between sales and marketing
6:00 – Building measurement into an ABM platform
7:15 – Refining the definition of ABM
10:45 – Building a better ABM platform
14:00 – The power of non-promotional content
15:30 – Why Danny got into marketing
17:00 – How marketing will change in the next 5 years
18:40 – Rising above the personalized/scalable trade-off
22:35 – How can marketers break free?
Danny:
I’ve developed what I call the ABM asset delivery platform. I worked with my agency to develop that. What it is, is a library of the assets we’ve already created for our ABM program at a global level.
So think about if you have, let’s say, five accounts in oil and gas globally, and they’re across there in four different regions, but the things that you create for them are synergistic across all five accounts. So they can be used for those five accounts, they most likely are going to be usable for any other oil and gas account in the world.
So what we do is there on the platform, a seller or marketer can go onto the platform and actually order that asset to be versioned for that account. If they do it at what we call level three, it takes three to five weeks, costs 1500 euro, and they’ve got this great asset that looks like it was developed specifically for their account.
Josh:
So this is a platform that’s almost a self-serve for sales and marketing?
Danny:
Think “Amazon” for ABM assets.
Josh:
Were there any challenges that you faced trying to get ABM aligned with both sales and marketing?
Danny:
I think that the biggest challenge is the relationship with sales. Because historically, marketing and sales have kind of been at odds a bit, which is unfortunate, but ABM brings the two together.
So throughout the development of each of my programs, I work closely with the sales leads of each of the accounts within the program. They’re involved in the creation of the assets. They’re involved in the messaging that happens within the assets for their account. So they have the opportunity to, at the end of the day, tailor their assets, the things that I developed for them even more so for their specific accounts. So they know it resonates with their account.
The key to that is understanding the sales cycle. And understanding how sellers think and what they’re up against. So we know that every year there at certain times of the year they’re going to be involved in Sapphire or field kickoff meetings or end of quarter close, so we’ve got to watch out and and be cognizant of the things that the salespeople are facing, so that when we go to them and ask for their time, we’re going at a time when we know they would have time.
Danny:
When I was asked to start the industry IBM program at SAP, there were three objectives: Have global marketing, get closer to sales and create something that can be scalable. Typically, when people think of scalability, they think of templates. So the whole bill of material is templatized. White Paper, tweets, let’s have three tweets, two blogs, sets of blog copy, an email, and the white paper and maybe an infographic that comes from the white paper, right? Every program, same bill of materials. With the platform and the way we build the assets, we don’t even think about what we’re going to build until we know the story we’re going to tell. And once we know the story we’re going to tell, depending on what type of story it is, that’s when we decide what type of asset or material we’re going to build. And then that goes on to the platform. It starts as generic, but then you can have it versioned at a number of different levels.
Danny:
The things that some people are calling ABM are really target account marketing. That should be the way we market on a daily basis. We should know what the sentiment about interest and intent data is for our target accounts, we should have a set of target accounts that we’re monitoring and serving our material to when they’re ready for it and when they’re basically asking for it because they’re showing intent on it. That should be the marketing across the board.
But then that should also lead to accounts where we can do account based marketing. So the continuum should be from target account marketing, to ABM, to one-to-one ABM, all the way across that scale, but it should start with target account marketing.
So we want to be done with customized or targeted lists. If you’re going to send something to somebody, at least make it as close to industry specific as you can, so that it’s talking in their language, and it’s talking about their problems.
Because HR issues, everyone would think they’re the same. But retail has totally different HR issues than oil and gas because of seasonality. And you’ve got seasonal workers around Christmas and holidays and things like that. So you need to be able to understand that and show your customers that you understand that because that’s how they’re thinking.
Josh:
I think we have this feeling that we have limited resources. So we have to find as much of a synergy as we can between messaging and it seems like with the technology that you’re working with, you don’t have to make that trade off anymore.
Danny:
That’s right. I think that’s one of the things — I think marketers have typically — when they thought scalability, again, they thought templatized. And instead of thinking templatized, think of different ways to scale, or the way you create the material that you create to make it more scalable, as opposed to making it templatized.
Use the creative you’ve done for one thing and repurpose it for another thing. So we’ve done that with one of our assets, it’s an automotive asset. That’s where a car is driving through a village, and it’s a linear story. So the next time we had a linear story, we changed it from a car driving through a village to a person walking through a store, same asset, just repurposed so that we could get the scale of at least the programming that we had done on the back end of the asset to make the the retail asset.
Danny:
You have to let go of templatized, old ideas. You have to break free of thinking about things the way we’ve always thought about them, and start really digging into how you can change what you’re doing and make it more efficient, more effective, but be creative about that. Because the platform didn’t exist, but now it does. And that’s because we got creative about how we could scale ABM, as opposed to adding people to scale or adding money to scale.
Stay tuned to the TopRank Marketing Blog and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more Break Free B2B interviews. Here are a few interviews to whet your appetite:
As business customers with questions are ignoring tone deaf brand marketing (and tiring of Pandemic messaging too) they are increasingly in search of information more than ever. Trust Radius reports that some B2B tech categories are seeing anywhere from 194% to 613% increases in search driven traffic. Search engines are clearly positioned to deliver answers for buyers seeking answers, but where is the trust? And more importantly, is your brand the best answer when and where buyers are looking?
SEO alone is not enough. A study from CSO insights ranked Web searches the 8th most trusted source of information for technology buyers. According to a study by Forbes/Yext, only 50% of customers believe search results. Search ads are not necessarily the solution because 65% of marketers don’t trust them either (HubSpot).
What good is being found in search if customers don’t trust what they find?
The solution? Make search optimized content more trustworthy, credible and useful by partnering with industry experts to create it. A Demand Gen Report study reports that 95% of buyers prefer influencer content. That’s an incredibly strong level of preference that B2B marketers would be negligent to ignore.
SEO and influence are excellent partners to deliver a satisfying content experience. To do that, you must first find the sweet spot for your customers with content that is findable with SEO and credible by showcasing relevant expertise from industry influencers.
Influencer content also optimizes B2B brands for Google E-A-T. Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness are page quality characteristics highlighted in Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. When B2B companies ensure their content demonstrates E-A-T characteristics, it’s akin to optimizing for both better Google and customers.
Credible Content Creation and Promotion can be a force multiplier for your marketing performance for multiple reasons. First, influential experts can extend the output of your marketing department by helping you make content. Second, those same experts can add credibility to brand content with quotes, insights on entirely influencer generated content. Third, the investment in content creation by those influential experts can also inspire them to promote that content to their trusted networks through social shares, inclusion in industry publications or cross published to influencer media (podcasts, livestream video, recorded video, blog posts, etc).
Like all marketing efforts, its important to identify your SEO and influencer marketing goals: improved organic search visibility, increased click through rates from Google to your site, improved time on site, increased click throughs from SEO landing pages to deeper content, and conversions referred from organic search.
Because influencers are involved, you can also benchmark and monitor the brand share of voice on social networks for the influencers you are working with, the social reach and impressions of their social shares, the referred traffic and conversions from their shares.
If the influencers you are working with publish their own content and you are able to engage them to cross-post or create original content aligned with your campaign, you can track the search visibility of your brand mentions on their websites. Doing so can help you manage achieving multiple positions within search results on the same query.
To help you get started towards realizing the marketing multiplier effect of integrated SEO and influencer marketing, here is a checklist of considerations in 5 sections:
Step 1 – Create Your Target Customer Profile
Describe your customer – demographics, psychographics, firmographics
What search keywords matter to this customer?
Which types of influencers matter to this customer?
What content topics and types are important for this customer?
What questions does this customer want answered?
Which social platforms does this customer use?
Which publications, podcasts or “shows” does this customer subscribe to?
Step 2 – Identify Influencers for SEO Topics
Leveraging SEO keyword research and an understanding of the content to be created/optimized, research 5-10 on-topic influencers using BuzzSumo, Traackr or other influencer marketing software.
Identify influencers creating on-topic content with great search visibility (Consider influencers recognized by Google with a Knowledge Panel).
Evaluate influencer’s link attraction rate when they publish or contribute content.
Align search keywords and corresponding influencers with content intended to function at the appropriate stage in the customer journey: Top, Middle and Bottom of funnel.
Step 3 – Influencer Content Activation
Use the Target Customer Profile to document specific content types and content sources (social platforms, media, blogs, newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels etc) that matter to your customer.
By topic, map relevant influencers to specific content assets for activation.
Engage influencers and invite them to provide content for their assigned topics in the format preferred.
Use SEO topics in influencer interview questions to inspire SEO-friendly answers.
Step 4 – Content Promotion
Identify opportunities to engage individual influencers for content promotion. Examples include: podcast, webinar, report contribution, social shares, quotes for blog posts, 3rd party editorial, newsletter or brand social channels.
Create UTM codes for URLs of content provided to influencers to share so they can be tracked in your analytics.
Provide influencer creators with topic clusters they can organically use in content and social shares.
Identify pre-launch influencer engagement opportunities – provide prewritten social shares.
Create an announcement blog posts, social promotions and engage influencers to create blog, video and social network content.
Create a series of promotional emails.
Support blog, social and earned media with targeted online advertising.
Post launch, repurpose influencer content on brand social networks, blog and in contributed articles.
Step 5 – Ongoing Influencer Engagement
Monitor the group of influencers you are working with for brand & keyword mentions on social networks and engage appropriately.
Repurpose influencer quotes in ongoing content: newsletters, presentations, contributed articles to publications, ebooks, infographics, etc.
Share updates with the influencers you are working with on the status of the campaign they participated in, updates to relevant technology or solutions and about your influencer program.
Find ways to connect influencers with each other: host an influencer happy hour on Zoom, create a LinkedIn or Facebook group, create channel on Slack.
Surprise and delight influencer contributors with feedback, tokens of appreciation and thank you’s.
Consider providing influencers with SEO audits of their blogs so they can improve their organic search visibility.
Topics that drive SEO and topics that guide influencer identification and content collaboration are a natural fit and can expand the impact of your organic search visibility as well as the advocacy about your brand amongst trusted voices in your industry. As effective organic search visibility requires ongoing care and optimization, influencer relationships also require ongoing care and nurturing.
Organic SEO is a form of “always on marketing” that works 24/7 and a small ongoing investment can pay big dividends when your B2B brand content is presented by Google at the very moment the buyer is looking. The same optimism about influencers can be said when it comes to brand advocacy and a trusted industry expert organically recommends your brand.
I hope this checklist has provided you with some direction that will help you get started with a search optimized and integrated influencer marketing strategy. There are many levels of process, tools and deep expertise that can make implementing an effort like this successful in a reasonable amount of time. If you have any questions or need help, the masters of SEO and Influence at TopRank Marketing are happy to help! Visit our Influencer Marketing Services resources or contact us directly.
As business customers with questions are ignoring tone deaf brand marketing (and tiring of Pandemic messaging too) they are increasingly in search of information more than ever. Trust Radius reports that some B2B tech categories are seeing anywhere from 194% to 613% increases in search driven traffic. Search engines are clearly positioned to deliver answers for buyers seeking answers, but where is the trust? And more importantly, is your brand the best answer when and where buyers are looking?
SEO alone is not enough. A study from CSO insights ranked Web searches the 8th most trusted source of information for technology buyers. According to a study by Forbes/Yext, only 50% of customers believe search results. Search ads are not necessarily the solution because 65% of marketers don’t trust them either (HubSpot).
What good is being found in search if customers don’t trust what they find?
The solution? Make search optimized content more trustworthy, credible and useful by partnering with industry experts to create it. A Demand Gen Report study reports that 95% of buyers prefer influencer content. That’s an incredibly strong level of preference that B2B marketers would be negligent to ignore.
SEO and influence are excellent partners to deliver a satisfying content experience. To do that, you must first find the sweet spot for your customers with content that is findable with SEO and credible by showcasing relevant expertise from industry influencers.
Influencer content also optimizes B2B brands for Google E-A-T. Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness are page quality characteristics highlighted in Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. When B2B companies ensure their content demonstrates E-A-T characteristics, it’s akin to optimizing for both better Google and customers.
Credible Content Creation and Promotion can be a force multiplier for your marketing performance for multiple reasons. First, influential experts can extend the output of your marketing department by helping you make content. Second, those same experts can add credibility to brand content with quotes, insights on entirely influencer generated content. Third, the investment in content creation by those influential experts can also inspire them to promote that content to their trusted networks through social shares, inclusion in industry publications or cross published to influencer media (podcasts, livestream video, recorded video, blog posts, etc).
Like all marketing efforts, its important to identify your SEO and influencer marketing goals: improved organic search visibility, increased click through rates from Google to your site, improved time on site, increased click throughs from SEO landing pages to deeper content, and conversions referred from organic search.
Because influencers are involved, you can also benchmark and monitor the brand share of voice on social networks for the influencers you are working with, the social reach and impressions of their social shares, the referred traffic and conversions from their shares.
If the influencers you are working with publish their own content and you are able to engage them to cross-post or create original content aligned with your campaign, you can track the search visibility of your brand mentions on their websites. Doing so can help you manage achieving multiple positions within search results on the same query.
To help you get started towards realizing the marketing multiplier effect of integrated SEO and influencer marketing, here is a checklist of considerations in 5 sections:
Step 1 – Create Your Target Customer Profile
Describe your customer – demographics, psychographics, firmographics
What search keywords matter to this customer?
Which types of influencers matter to this customer?
What content topics and types are important for this customer?
What questions does this customer want answered?
Which social platforms does this customer use?
Which publications, podcasts or “shows” does this customer subscribe to?
Step 2 – Identify Influencers for SEO Topics
Leveraging SEO keyword research and an understanding of the content to be created/optimized, research 5-10 on-topic influencers using BuzzSumo, Traackr or other influencer marketing software.
Identify influencers creating on-topic content with great search visibility (Consider influencers recognized by Google with a Knowledge Panel).
Evaluate influencer’s link attraction rate when they publish or contribute content.
Align search keywords and corresponding influencers with content intended to function at the appropriate stage in the customer journey: Top, Middle and Bottom of funnel.
Step 3 – Influencer Content Activation
Use the Target Customer Profile to document specific content types and content sources (social platforms, media, blogs, newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels etc) that matter to your customer.
By topic, map relevant influencers to specific content assets for activation.
Engage influencers and invite them to provide content for their assigned topics in the format preferred.
Use SEO topics in influencer interview questions to inspire SEO-friendly answers.
Step 4 – Content Promotion
Identify opportunities to engage individual influencers for content promotion. Examples include: podcast, webinar, report contribution, social shares, quotes for blog posts, 3rd party editorial, newsletter or brand social channels.
Create UTM codes for URLs of content provided to influencers to share so they can be tracked in your analytics.
Provide influencer creators with topic clusters they can organically use in content and social shares.
Identify pre-launch influencer engagement opportunities – provide prewritten social shares.
Create an announcement blog posts, social promotions and engage influencers to create blog, video and social network content.
Create a series of promotional emails.
Support blog, social and earned media with targeted online advertising.
Post launch, repurpose influencer content on brand social networks, blog and in contributed articles.
Step 5 – Ongoing Influencer Engagement
Monitor the group of influencers you are working with for brand & keyword mentions on social networks and engage appropriately.
Repurpose influencer quotes in ongoing content: newsletters, presentations, contributed articles to publications, ebooks, infographics, etc.
Share updates with the influencers you are working with on the status of the campaign they participated in, updates to relevant technology or solutions and about your influencer program.
Find ways to connect influencers with each other: host an influencer happy hour on Zoom, create a LinkedIn or Facebook group, create channel on Slack.
Surprise and delight influencer contributors with feedback, tokens of appreciation and thank you’s.
Consider providing influencers with SEO audits of their blogs so they can improve their organic search visibility.
Topics that drive SEO and topics that guide influencer identification and content collaboration are a natural fit and can expand the impact of your organic search visibility as well as the advocacy about your brand amongst trusted voices in your industry. As effective organic search visibility requires ongoing care and optimization, influencer relationships also require ongoing care and nurturing.
Organic SEO is a form of “always on marketing” that works 24/7 and a small ongoing investment can pay big dividends when your B2B brand content is presented by Google at the very moment the buyer is looking. The same optimism about influencers can be said when it comes to brand advocacy and a trusted industry expert organically recommends your brand.
I hope this checklist has provided you with some direction that will help you get started with a search optimized and integrated influencer marketing strategy. There are many levels of process, tools and deep expertise that can make implementing an effort like this successful in a reasonable amount of time. If you have any questions or need help, the masters of SEO and Influence at TopRank Marketing are happy to help! Visit our Influencer Marketing Services resources or contact us directly.
How COVID-19 Is Impacting Business Event Planning
70 percent of business event planners have changed previously-planned in-person events to virtual platforms due to the pandemic, and 47 percent expect that once it ends people will still be hesitant to travel, with 27 percent expecting a swift uptick in real-world events due to pent-up demand, according to newly-released survey data from the Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA). MarketingProfs
Google ad sales steady after coronavirus drop; Alphabet leads tech share rally
2020 first-quarter advertising sales at Google tallied $33.8 billion, with 73 percent coming from search and 12 percent from its YouTube property, and Google’s ad business accounting for some 83 percent of revenue for parent firm Alphabet, according to newly-released financial results. Reuters
Spotify-owned Anchor can now turn your video chats into podcasts
Spotify will utilize its Anchor property to make it possible to convert video meeting content into podcasts, offering marketers new options for making use of a virtual hangout video content podcast conversion feature, Spotify recently announced. TechCrunch
Google’s new Podcasts Manager tool offers deeper data on listener behavior
Google has rolled out a new podcast analytics data feature — Podcasts Manager — that provides marketers an assortment of new podcast listening data, the search giant recently announced. Marketing Land
LinkedIn’s up to 690 Million Members, Reports 26% Growth in User Sessions
LinkedIn (client) saw its user base increase to 690 million members — up from 675 in January — with an accompanying 26 percent increase in user sessions, and LinkedIn Live streams that increased by some 158 percent since February, according to parent firm Microsoft’s latest earnings release. Social Media Today
Advertisers Continued to Gravitate to Instagram in Q1
Advertisers moved to spend more on Instagram during the first quarter of 2020, with ad spending up 39 percent year-over-year on the platform, holding steady at 27 percent of parent company Facebook’s total ad spend, according to recently-released Merkle data. MarketingCharts
Brands Are Using More Data And Spending More On It: Study
B2B marketers are making greater use of data and spending increasingly to gather it, according to recent report data from Ascend2, showing that 47 percent use engagement data to make marketing decisions, one of several report statistics of interest to digital marketers. MediaPost
Most consumers are trying new brands during social distancing, study finds
Brands are seeing newfound levels of audience interest, with an uptick in consumer interest for trying new brands that has been observed during the pandemic, with members of the Gen Z and Millennial demographic seeing the biggest increases, according to recently-released survey data. Campaign US
Marketers Ante Up for In-Game Advertising
A $3 billion in-game advertising market in the U.S. alone has attracted additional advertisers, and a new Association of National Advertisers (ANA) examination of data from eMarketer found some surprises in that most mobile gamers were over 35, with 20 percent being over 50, while the majority were female, several of the in-game advertising statistics of interest to digital marketers. ANA
Data Hub: Coronavirus and Marketing [Updated]
Digital marketing has fared better than traditional campaigns in the face of the global health crisis, according to newly-released survey data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) exploring the differences between the pandemic and the 2008 recession. MarketingCharts
ON THE LIGHTER SIDE:
A lighthearted look at generic advertising “in these uncertain times” by Marketoonist Tom Fishburne — Marketoonist
WHO Releases New Guidelines to Avoid Being Nominated for Viral Challenges — The Hard Times
Major Relief: Microsoft Has Confirmed That The Xbox Series X Will Play Video Games — The Onion
TOPRANK MARKETING & CLIENTS IN THE NEWS:
Lee Odden — What’s Trending: Embracing Data — LinkedIn (client)
Lee Odden — 10 Expert Tips for Marketing During a Crisis — Oracle (client)
Lee Odden — Klear Interviews Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Marketing [Video] — Klear
Lee Odden and TopRank Marketing — Pandemic Cross-Country Skiing in Duluth, Minnesota: A Personal Timeline — Lane R. Ellis
Thanks for taking time to join us, and we hope you will join us again next Friday for more of the most relevant B2B and digital marketing industry news. In the meantime, you can follow us at @toprank on Twitter for even more timely daily news. Also, don’t miss the full video summary on our TopRank Marketing TV YouTube Channel.
How COVID-19 Is Impacting Business Event Planning
70 percent of business event planners have changed previously-planned in-person events to virtual platforms due to the pandemic, and 47 percent expect that once it ends people will still be hesitant to travel, with 27 percent expecting a swift uptick in real-world events due to pent-up demand, according to newly-released survey data from the Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA). MarketingProfs
Google ad sales steady after coronavirus drop; Alphabet leads tech share rally
2020 first-quarter advertising sales at Google tallied $33.8 billion, with 73 percent coming from search and 12 percent from its YouTube property, and Google’s ad business accounting for some 83 percent of revenue for parent firm Alphabet, according to newly-released financial results. Reuters
Spotify-owned Anchor can now turn your video chats into podcasts
Spotify will utilize its Anchor property to make it possible to convert video meeting content into podcasts, offering marketers new options for making use of a virtual hangout video content podcast conversion feature, Spotify recently announced. TechCrunch
Google’s new Podcasts Manager tool offers deeper data on listener behavior
Google has rolled out a new podcast analytics data feature — Podcasts Manager — that provides marketers an assortment of new podcast listening data, the search giant recently announced. Marketing Land
LinkedIn’s up to 690 Million Members, Reports 26% Growth in User Sessions
LinkedIn (client) saw its user base increase to 690 million members — up from 675 in January — with an accompanying 26 percent increase in user sessions, and LinkedIn Live streams that increased by some 158 percent since February, according to parent firm Microsoft’s latest earnings release. Social Media Today
Advertisers Continued to Gravitate to Instagram in Q1
Advertisers moved to spend more on Instagram during the first quarter of 2020, with ad spending up 39 percent year-over-year on the platform, holding steady at 27 percent of parent company Facebook’s total ad spend, according to recently-released Merkle data. MarketingCharts
Brands Are Using More Data And Spending More On It: Study
B2B marketers are making greater use of data and spending increasingly to gather it, according to recent report data from Ascend2, showing that 47 percent use engagement data to make marketing decisions, one of several report statistics of interest to digital marketers. MediaPost
Most consumers are trying new brands during social distancing, study finds
Brands are seeing newfound levels of audience interest, with an uptick in consumer interest for trying new brands that has been observed during the pandemic, with members of the Gen Z and Millennial demographic seeing the biggest increases, according to recently-released survey data. Campaign US
Marketers Ante Up for In-Game Advertising
A $3 billion in-game advertising market in the U.S. alone has attracted additional advertisers, and a new Association of National Advertisers (ANA) examination of data from eMarketer found some surprises in that most mobile gamers were over 35, with 20 percent being over 50, while the majority were female, several of the in-game advertising statistics of interest to digital marketers. ANA
Data Hub: Coronavirus and Marketing [Updated]
Digital marketing has fared better than traditional campaigns in the face of the global health crisis, according to newly-released survey data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) exploring the differences between the pandemic and the 2008 recession. MarketingCharts
ON THE LIGHTER SIDE:
A lighthearted look at generic advertising “in these uncertain times” by Marketoonist Tom Fishburne — Marketoonist
WHO Releases New Guidelines to Avoid Being Nominated for Viral Challenges — The Hard Times
Major Relief: Microsoft Has Confirmed That The Xbox Series X Will Play Video Games — The Onion
TOPRANK MARKETING & CLIENTS IN THE NEWS:
Lee Odden — What’s Trending: Embracing Data — LinkedIn (client)
Lee Odden — 10 Expert Tips for Marketing During a Crisis — Oracle (client)
Lee Odden — Klear Interviews Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Marketing [Video] — Klear
Lee Odden and TopRank Marketing — Pandemic Cross-Country Skiing in Duluth, Minnesota: A Personal Timeline — Lane R. Ellis
Thanks for taking time to join us, and we hope you will join us again next Friday for more of the most relevant B2B and digital marketing industry news. In the meantime, you can follow us at @toprank on Twitter for even more timely daily news. Also, don’t miss the full video summary on our TopRank Marketing TV YouTube Channel.
While their importance pales in comparison to many other things taken away by our society’s ongoing lockdown, I do find myself missing sports. Going without them during a difficult time causes me to appreciate the comfortable routine and reliable distraction they provide all the more.
Those who know me will not be surprised to learn that I’m longing for baseball especially — everything from strikeouts and singles to slides and steals. But there is no part of the game I miss more than home runs.
Home runs are among the most satisfying individual achievements in sports. When a batter goes deep, he takes care of everything, going from home plate to home plate and putting a run — or more — on the board single-handedly. It is the literal representation of “covering all your bases.”
With baseball and many other cherished forms of entertainment amiss, content marketers can help fill the void by focusing on experiential content, which is characterized by its ability to pull in a user through immersive, interactive, impactful elements. These kinds of deeper digital experiences are also more valuable from an engagement and awareness standpoint, at a time where in-person events are off the table.
“Because people are figuring out how to thrive in an almost entirely online world, their expectations towards a brand’s digital experience [are] also changing. It’s no longer about clicks, downloads, and impressions,” writes Diginomica’s Barb Mosher Zinck in recapping Mark Bornstein’s chat from the Discover Martech Virtual Event last month. “It’s about engagement. It’s about experiential marketing.”
With this context in mind, how can marketers hit a home run with experiential content, covering all the bases for both their audience and their business?
Covering Every Base with Experiential Content
Reflecting the baseball diamond, I see four key aspects of knocking it out of the park with experiential content, at a time where doing so might be especially beneficial for marketers.
Base 1: Entertaining and Effective
The proverbial square one (or first base, in this case) is that experiential content needs to be compelling and engaging. If you aren’t getting someone’s attention and piquing their interest quickly with the content, you’re out before you’ve left the batter’s box.
Technology is always offering new ways to increase the allure of experiential content, including tools like virtual reality, augmented reality, feature integration, and interactive functionality. Small touches like the animations and clickable elements in TopRank Marketing’s Break Free of Boring B2B infographic, for example, can go a long way. The more you bring the user into the experience and make them feel like part of the story, the more successful your content will be.
It’s not just about the entertainment factor. That second word — effective — is equally important, if not more so. Your content should effect the person consuming it, be it emotionally or attitudinally. Ideally, the person consuming this experience will feel something, and come away thinking differently about its subject.
Once you accomplish this, you’re rounding first base and heading into second.
[bctt tweet=”“If you aren’t getting someone’s attention and piquing their interest quickly with the content, you’re out before you’ve left the batter’s box.” @NickNelsonMN” username=”toprank”]
Base 2: Educational and Informative
Most marketing content is designed to inform in some way, satisfying the curiosities of its audience while intertwining a distinct point of view. The experiential dynamic is particularly valuable for this purpose. As the old saying goes: “Show me and I’ll forget. Teach me and I may remember. Involve me and I’ll learn.”
AT&T is one example of a company that’s using emerging experiential technologies for employee training purposes, taking advantage of the heightened ability to make information stick. As you plan a content marketing initiative, think not just about ways to entertain your audience, but also ways to memorably imprint the messages and revelations you want them to take away.
By this point, you’re already halfway home.
Base 3: Collaborative and Orchestrated
Hey, there’s nothing wrong with a solo home run. But the feat is far more exciting when there are runners on base to drive in. Teamwork comes into play in multiple ways when it comes to maximizing the value of experiential content.
First and foremost, your efforts should be strategically orchestrated throughout the organization. While marketing drives the bus, plenty of others ought to be riding along. By nature, experiential content is intended to address a nonlinear customer journey in which B2B buyers average 17 meaningful interactions on the way to completing a purchase (per SiriusDecisions). How do all those interactions come together around your experience in a consistent, unified, personalized way? How will you ensure that every customer-facing function is aligned?
Secondly, there is the importance of collaboration within the marketing department itself. Generally speaking, a great piece of experiential content is shaped by many different talents and skills: writers and strategists shaping the content, designers and artists bringing it to life visually, search and social specialists making it easily discoverable, etc.
And finally, there is the influencer aspect. While not always a fit, influencers can usually power up experiential content in profound ways:
Adding unique insight and perspective from their expert point of view
Bringing built-in credibility and trust with their own established audiences
Amplifying promotion of the content through their own networks
One example of interactive influencer content in action can be found in the self-guided experience around AI and finance that TopRank Marketing put together with Prophix. The asset beat engagement benchmarks by 642%.
[bctt tweet=”“Great experiential content is shaped by many different talents: writers and strategists shaping the content, designers and artists bringing it to life visually, search and social specialists making it easily discoverable.” @NickNelsonMN” username=”toprank”]
Bringing It Home: Impactful for the Business
The three components above all focus on making experiential content valuable to the audience. This is a worthy point of emphasis, since strengthening relationships and building trust are essential objectives for modern brands, especially in our current climate.
But of course, investing the time and resources into creating a high-caliber content experience also needs to be justified by bottom-line business impact. The good news is that bringing users into the experience lends itself to driving action; for example, statistics show that interactive content generates twice the conversions of passive content.
At all comes back to the overarching strategy. What specific business results are you hoping to achieve? How will you facilitate them in a user-friendly way that nurtures trust and builds momentum in the customer journey? Which other tactics will support these goals?
It’s important to think about setting up positive outcomes beyond the direct conversion. A person interacting with your content may not be inclined to fill out a form at that moment, but if they remember the experience, and the way it altered their thinking, and it brings them into your marketing funnel weeks or months later, that’s a win. This reinforces the value of getting it right with items one and two on this list — effect and educate.
Make Your Experiential Content Campaign a Round-Tripper
We may not have sports, but we still have sports metaphors. I’ll keep seeing to that. And the home run serves as a perfectly fitting allegory for experiential content, which can produce so much value for a brand on its own, with one swing of the proverbial bat.
When you combine immersive entertainment with memorable learnings, collaborative clout, and measurable business impact, you’ve got yourself a marketing moonshot. All that’s left at that point is the bat flip.
For more practical tips and guidance on this subject, I encourage you to check out Joshua Nite’s recap of the B2B Marketer’s Journey To Experiential Content presentation from B2B Marketing Exchange in February.
While their importance pales in comparison to many other things taken away by our society’s ongoing lockdown, I do find myself missing sports. Going without them during a difficult time causes me to appreciate the comfortable routine and reliable distraction they provide all the more.
Those who know me will not be surprised to learn that I’m longing for baseball especially — everything from strikeouts and singles to slides and steals. But there is no part of the game I miss more than home runs.
Home runs are among the most satisfying individual achievements in sports. When a batter goes deep, he takes care of everything, going from home plate to home plate and putting a run — or more — on the board single-handedly. It is the literal representation of “covering all your bases.”
With baseball and many other cherished forms of entertainment amiss, content marketers can help fill the void by focusing on experiential content, which is characterized by its ability to pull in a user through immersive, interactive, impactful elements. These kinds of deeper digital experiences are also more valuable from an engagement and awareness standpoint, at a time where in-person events are off the table.
“Because people are figuring out how to thrive in an almost entirely online world, their expectations towards a brand’s digital experience [are] also changing. It’s no longer about clicks, downloads, and impressions,” writes Diginomica’s Barb Mosher Zinck in recapping Mark Bornstein’s chat from the Discover Martech Virtual Event last month. “It’s about engagement. It’s about experiential marketing.”
With this context in mind, how can marketers hit a home run with experiential content, covering all the bases for both their audience and their business?
Covering Every Base with Experiential Content
Reflecting the baseball diamond, I see four key aspects of knocking it out of the park with experiential content, at a time where doing so might be especially beneficial for marketers.
Base 1: Entertaining and Effective
The proverbial square one (or first base, in this case) is that experiential content needs to be compelling and engaging. If you aren’t getting someone’s attention and piquing their interest quickly with the content, you’re out before you’ve left the batter’s box.
Technology is always offering new ways to increase the allure of experiential content, including tools like virtual reality, augmented reality, feature integration, and interactive functionality. Small touches like the animations and clickable elements in TopRank Marketing’s Break Free of Boring B2B infographic, for example, can go a long way. The more you bring the user into the experience and make them feel like part of the story, the more successful your content will be.
It’s not just about the entertainment factor. That second word — effective — is equally important, if not more so. Your content should effect the person consuming it, be it emotionally or attitudinally. Ideally, the person consuming this experience will feel something, and come away thinking differently about its subject.
Once you accomplish this, you’re rounding first base and heading into second.
[bctt tweet=”“If you aren’t getting someone’s attention and piquing their interest quickly with the content, you’re out before you’ve left the batter’s box.” @NickNelsonMN” username=”toprank”]
Base 2: Educational and Informative
Most marketing content is designed to inform in some way, satisfying the curiosities of its audience while intertwining a distinct point of view. The experiential dynamic is particularly valuable for this purpose. As the old saying goes: “Show me and I’ll forget. Teach me and I may remember. Involve me and I’ll learn.”
AT&T is one example of a company that’s using emerging experiential technologies for employee training purposes, taking advantage of the heightened ability to make information stick. As you plan a content marketing initiative, think not just about ways to entertain your audience, but also ways to memorably imprint the messages and revelations you want them to take away.
By this point, you’re already halfway home.
Base 3: Collaborative and Orchestrated
Hey, there’s nothing wrong with a solo home run. But the feat is far more exciting when there are runners on base to drive in. Teamwork comes into play in multiple ways when it comes to maximizing the value of experiential content.
First and foremost, your efforts should be strategically orchestrated throughout the organization. While marketing drives the bus, plenty of others ought to be riding along. By nature, experiential content is intended to address a nonlinear customer journey in which B2B buyers average 17 meaningful interactions on the way to completing a purchase (per SiriusDecisions). How do all those interactions come together around your experience in a consistent, unified, personalized way? How will you ensure that every customer-facing function is aligned?
Secondly, there is the importance of collaboration within the marketing department itself. Generally speaking, a great piece of experiential content is shaped by many different talents and skills: writers and strategists shaping the content, designers and artists bringing it to life visually, search and social specialists making it easily discoverable, etc.
And finally, there is the influencer aspect. While not always a fit, influencers can usually power up experiential content in profound ways:
Adding unique insight and perspective from their expert point of view
Bringing built-in credibility and trust with their own established audiences
Amplifying promotion of the content through their own networks
One example of interactive influencer content in action can be found in the self-guided experience around AI and finance that TopRank Marketing put together with Prophix. The asset beat engagement benchmarks by 642%.
[bctt tweet=”“Great experiential content is shaped by many different talents: writers and strategists shaping the content, designers and artists bringing it to life visually, search and social specialists making it easily discoverable.” @NickNelsonMN” username=”toprank”]
Bringing It Home: Impactful for the Business
The three components above all focus on making experiential content valuable to the audience. This is a worthy point of emphasis, since strengthening relationships and building trust are essential objectives for modern brands, especially in our current climate.
But of course, investing the time and resources into creating a high-caliber content experience also needs to be justified by bottom-line business impact. The good news is that bringing users into the experience lends itself to driving action; for example, statistics show that interactive content generates twice the conversions of passive content.
At all comes back to the overarching strategy. What specific business results are you hoping to achieve? How will you facilitate them in a user-friendly way that nurtures trust and builds momentum in the customer journey? Which other tactics will support these goals?
It’s important to think about setting up positive outcomes beyond the direct conversion. A person interacting with your content may not be inclined to fill out a form at that moment, but if they remember the experience, and the way it altered their thinking, and it brings them into your marketing funnel weeks or months later, that’s a win. This reinforces the value of getting it right with items one and two on this list — effect and educate.
Make Your Experiential Content Campaign a Round-Tripper
We may not have sports, but we still have sports metaphors. I’ll keep seeing to that. And the home run serves as a perfectly fitting allegory for experiential content, which can produce so much value for a brand on its own, with one swing of the proverbial bat.
When you combine immersive entertainment with memorable learnings, collaborative clout, and measurable business impact, you’ve got yourself a marketing moonshot. All that’s left at that point is the bat flip.
For more practical tips and guidance on this subject, I encourage you to check out Joshua Nite’s recap of the B2B Marketer’s Journey To Experiential Content presentation from B2B Marketing Exchange in February.
B2B marketing is boring, doesn’t feature influencers, and uses only monotonous white papers and lifeless case studies — we’ve all heard these stereotypes, but what is the reality of B2B marketing in 2020?
The traditional image of dull B2B marketing has been turned on its head in recent years, and we wanted to explore 10 top myths and show how the state of B2B marketing has gone from bland to unforgettable.
Let’s dig in and break down the biggest B2B marketing myths, and look at how your brand can benefit from the new era of business marketing.
1 — B2B Marketing Goes From Boring-2-Boringest
The Myth:
The grand-daddy of all B2B marketing myths — dating back nearly to when the term business-to-business was coined — is the notion that it stands for boring-to-boring, with marketing about as exciting as forty shades of dreary gray.
The Myth-Buster:
As we’ll explore throughout this post, the B2B marketing of 2020 has left boring in the dust, replaced with exciting and truly memorable content experiences.
As the B2B marketing landscape continues progressing from its dusty Boring-To-Boring roots, business customers are expecting content and experiences that are increasingly similar to what B2C efforts have long provided.
Today’s B2B customers expect to find all of the relevant information they seek brought to life through an online interface that’s not only easy to search and navigate, but one that’s also chock full of interactive and story-rich user experience features that make interacting an entertaining experience, such as our “Laser Bear.”
[bctt tweet=”“Tell the truth, but make the truth fascinating. You know you can’t bore people into buying your product, you can only interest them into buying it.” — David Ogilvy” username=”toprank”]
2 — B2B Marketing Doesn’t Use the Cool Social Media Platforms
The Myth:
You won’t find B2B brands actively sharing content and interacting on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest, Twitch, or other fun and fresh social media platforms.
The Myth-Buster:
Fortune 500 firms regularly now have social media presences on fashionable social channels such as Giphy, Snapchat, and even Facebook Horizons — the social media giant’s foray into the virtual reality (VR) world — all gaining new B2B brands at a faster pace than you might imagine.
Out client Dell Technologies offers a fine example of how B2B brands are embracing nontraditional social channels, with its Dell Technologies Giphy page.
Despite using social media more than any other demographic, Gen Z is most at home not on traditional mainstream social platforms but increasingly on gaming platforms, according to recent Kantar study data, which showed that 90 percent of the demographic use gaming platforms to serve roles similar to those social media does for some 59 percent of the general population.
To learn more, we’ve also looked at how B2B brands are successfully using various social media platforms:
[bctt tweet=”“B2B marketers should be exploring any channel where their audience is. While it’s easy to feel like the more younger-skewing platforms are optional, we ignore them at our peril.” — Joshua Nite @NiteWrites” username=”toprank”]
3 — B2B Marketing Doesn’t Relate to Real People & Their Stories
The Myth:
B2B marketing isn’t about me or my real challenges, and never even attempts to appeal to people like me — instead it just continues to put forth insincere messages targeting people who don’t exist in the real world.
The Myth-Buster:
Telling real stories about actual people has catapulted B2B influencer marketing to the forefront of business marketing success, while B2B marketing in general has also continued to embrace the importance of storytelling.
[bctt tweet=”“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.” — Steve Jobs” username=”toprank”]
4 — B2B Marketing Never Gets Heard, or If it Does It’s Quickly Ignored and Forgotten
The Myth:
B2B marketing is just wasted effort, since nobody ever really reads it or pays any attention to its boring business-suit-and-briefcase imagery. Who would ever remember a B2B advertising message, anyway?
The Myth-Buster:
Study after study continues to show that real emotion makes us remember digital content and messaging, and smart B2B marketing has grown significantly in its use of the kind of authentic storytelling that people will remember.
[bctt tweet=”“Stories are just data with a soul.” @BreneBrown” username=”toprank”]
5 — B2B Marketing is For Stodgy Old People
The Myth:
B2B marketing is for stodgy old fuddy-duddies, and has no relevance for anyone under 40 or 50.
The Myth-Buster:
B2B marketers freshly out of college are having tremendous impact in today’s professional brand messaging, and are bringing with them their younger takes on B2B marketing, which will increasingly drive the industry.
Thanks in large part to the successful inroads B2B influencer marketing have made for brands looking to reach younger audiences, when an influencer recommends a product, 51 percent of Millennials say they are more likely to try it, according to research data from Valassis and Kantar.
Gen Z and Millennial B2B marketers who have grown up with newer social media platforms are occupying ever-more positions of power all the way up to corporate marketing management — a move that has helped today’s B2B marketing look decidedly different from that of even five years ago.
Snapchat recently published a study exploring brand expectations among Gen Z, finding that 82 percent of the demographic want brands to act on customer feedback, while a similar report from Campaign Monitor also found Gen Z’s social media platform preferences to differ from those of older generations.
[bctt tweet=”“the B2B marketing of 2020 has left boring in the dust, replaced with exciting and truly memorable content experiences.” — Lane R. Ellis @lanerellis” username=”toprank”]
6 — B2B Marketing Should Never Include Interactive or Experiential Content
The Myth:
B2B audiences don’t expect or even want interactive or experiential content when it comes to brand messaging — they want only dense black-and-white case studies of at least 200 pages, or white papers filled with serious professional business information.
The Myth-Buster:
B2B audiences have been starved for interactive and experiential content for far too long, and in recent years have come to expect much more B2C-like digital experiences which incorporate truly entertaining, memorable, and interactive elements.
With 98 percent of consumers more likely to make a purchase after an experience (Limelight), and 77 percent having chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that delivers a personalized service or experience (Forrester), more B2B marketers have begun to use experiential content.
In 2020 experiential content comes in many forms, with just a few examples being:
Virtual Reality (VR)
Augmented Reality (AR)
Cloud-Based Digital Assets from Ceros and Other Platforms
Quizzes and Polls
Interactive Flipbooks and eBooks
Experiential content is also intertwined with both storytelling and customer experience (CX), together becoming an extremely powerful triptych of B2B marketing strategy.
You can take a closer look at the growing field of B2B experiential marketing here:
[bctt tweet=”“Experiential content makes us a central part of a story, and not just a passive subject receiving a one-way brand message.” — Lane R. Ellis @lanerellis” username=”toprank”]
7 — B2B Marketing Doesn’t Have Influencers
The Myth:
Influencers don’t exist in B2B marketing, because they are only for hawking cosmetics and pushing designer clothing lines on Instagram — what relevance could influencers really have in the professional B2B world?
Influencer marketing will see global brand spending up to $15 billion by 2022 (Business Insider Intelligence), and with more people using social media and spending greater amounts of time doing so, B2B influencers have a bigger audience than ever.
[bctt tweet=”“The output of B2B influencer collaboration can be in any form that the brand is currently publishing content: text, video, visual, audio, interactive and even VR.” @LeeOdden” username=”toprank”]
Learn more about B2B influencer marketing with these insightful looks at how brands are using it to achieve success, and dig in to recent influencer marketing statistics here:
8 — B2B Marketing is Pointless & Impossible For Brands Than Aren’t Billion-Dollar Firms
The Myth:
B2B marketing is only for billion-dollar mega-corporations looking to attract other massive Fortune 500 firms — and it doesn’t have any relevance for a company with less than 10,000 employees.
The Myth-Buster:
It doesn’t take billion-dollar firms to create priceless B2B marketing efforts. Indeed, some of the most successful and memorable B2B marketing campaigns are coming from small-to-midsize firms, especially those that are using B2B influencer marketing.
Our content strategist Anne Leuman recently took a look at “5 Examples of Effective B2B Content Marketing in Times of Crisis,” featuring several smaller firms including HealthcareSource and our client monday.com, showing how they are putting out timely and helpful marketing messages during the pandemic.
Social media and influencer marketing have helped level the playing field not only among large B2C and B2B firms, but smaller B2B businesses as well.
Being savvy and nimble can propel a business a long way in the B2B marketing world — perhaps even over land and water, as Shakespeare once noted.
[bctt tweet=”“Nimble thought can jump both sea and land.” — William Shakespeare” username=”toprank”]
9 — B2B Marketing Isn’t Even Well-Suited for Social Media
The Myth:
B2B marketers shouldn’t even use social media, since business audiences don’t use social platforms, or if they do, they’re not there to find serious B2B information.
The Myth-Buster:
Nearly everyone uses social media in 2020, with global active social media users topping the 3.8 billion mark recently, and that includes almost all the business professionals in every B2B industry.
Social media and B2B marketing go hand-in-hand these days, and smart marketers recognize the importance of this intertwined system, and work hard to inform and delight on every social channel where their brand’s customers are actively engaging.
[bctt tweet=”“It doesn’t take billion-dollar firms to create priceless B2B marketing efforts.” — Lane R. Ellis @lanerellis” username=”toprank”]
10 — B2B Marketing’s Only Real Channel is LinkedIn
The Myth:
LinkedIn is the only social media platform B2B marketers ever need to use, because it’s the only one those in B2B industries ever really utilize.
The Myth-Buster:
While it’s true that LinkedIn is the top social media platform for B2B marketers and professionals in general, and still represents the go-to source for business information when it comes to social — and we’re not just saying that because they are a TopRank Marketing client — if you’re limiting your efforts solely to LinkedIn you’re missing out on key industry players who happen to spend the majority of their social media time on other platforms.
As we’ve shown above, there are a wide array of social media channels B2B marketers are finding vital to their brand efforts. With every Fortune 500 firm now represented on LinkedIn, however, it’s a platform that should be included in every B2B marketer’s mix.
Soar Beyond B2B Myths With Powerful Marketing Tactics
Now that we’ve made an effort to dispel these 10 common B2B marketing myths, we hope that you’ll be better able to power your next marketing campaign using the tactics we’ve looked at, and create B2B content that inspires and enchants while also providing best-answer solutions.
B2B marketing is boring, doesn’t feature influencers, and uses only monotonous white papers and lifeless case studies — we’ve all heard these stereotypes, but what is the reality of B2B marketing in 2020?
The traditional image of dull B2B marketing has been turned on its head in recent years, and we wanted to explore 10 top myths and show how the state of B2B marketing has gone from bland to unforgettable.
Let’s dig in and break down the biggest B2B marketing myths, and look at how your brand can benefit from the new era of business marketing.
1 — B2B Marketing Goes From Boring-2-Boringest
The Myth:
The grand-daddy of all B2B marketing myths — dating back nearly to when the term business-to-business was coined — is the notion that it stands for boring-to-boring, with marketing about as exciting as forty shades of dreary gray.
The Myth-Buster:
As we’ll explore throughout this post, the B2B marketing of 2020 has left boring in the dust, replaced with exciting and truly memorable content experiences.
As the B2B marketing landscape continues progressing from its dusty Boring-To-Boring roots, business customers are expecting content and experiences that are increasingly similar to what B2C efforts have long provided.
Today’s B2B customers expect to find all of the relevant information they seek brought to life through an online interface that’s not only easy to search and navigate, but one that’s also chock full of interactive and story-rich user experience features that make interacting an entertaining experience, such as our “Laser Bear.”
[bctt tweet=”“Tell the truth, but make the truth fascinating. You know you can’t bore people into buying your product, you can only interest them into buying it.” — David Ogilvy” username=”toprank”]
2 — B2B Marketing Doesn’t Use the Cool Social Media Platforms
The Myth:
You won’t find B2B brands actively sharing content and interacting on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest, Twitch, or other fun and fresh social media platforms.
The Myth-Buster:
Fortune 500 firms regularly now have social media presences on fashionable social channels such as Giphy, Snapchat, and even Facebook Horizons — the social media giant’s foray into the virtual reality (VR) world — all gaining new B2B brands at a faster pace than you might imagine.
Out client Dell Technologies offers a fine example of how B2B brands are embracing nontraditional social channels, with its Dell Technologies Giphy page.
Despite using social media more than any other demographic, Gen Z is most at home not on traditional mainstream social platforms but increasingly on gaming platforms, according to recent Kantar study data, which showed that 90 percent of the demographic use gaming platforms to serve roles similar to those social media does for some 59 percent of the general population.
To learn more, we’ve also looked at how B2B brands are successfully using various social media platforms:
[bctt tweet=”“B2B marketers should be exploring any channel where their audience is. While it’s easy to feel like the more younger-skewing platforms are optional, we ignore them at our peril.” — Joshua Nite @NiteWrites” username=”toprank”]
3 — B2B Marketing Doesn’t Relate to Real People & Their Stories
The Myth:
B2B marketing isn’t about me or my real challenges, and never even attempts to appeal to people like me — instead it just continues to put forth insincere messages targeting people who don’t exist in the real world.
The Myth-Buster:
Telling real stories about actual people has catapulted B2B influencer marketing to the forefront of business marketing success, while B2B marketing in general has also continued to embrace the importance of storytelling.
[bctt tweet=”“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.” — Steve Jobs” username=”toprank”]
4 — B2B Marketing Never Gets Heard, or If it Does It’s Quickly Ignored and Forgotten
The Myth:
B2B marketing is just wasted effort, since nobody ever really reads it or pays any attention to its boring business-suit-and-briefcase imagery. Who would ever remember a B2B advertising message, anyway?
The Myth-Buster:
Study after study continues to show that real emotion makes us remember digital content and messaging, and smart B2B marketing has grown significantly in its use of the kind of authentic storytelling that people will remember.
[bctt tweet=”“Stories are just data with a soul.” @BreneBrown” username=”toprank”]
5 — B2B Marketing is For Stodgy Old People
The Myth:
B2B marketing is for stodgy old fuddy-duddies, and has no relevance for anyone under 40 or 50.
The Myth-Buster:
B2B marketers freshly out of college are having tremendous impact in today’s professional brand messaging, and are bringing with them their younger takes on B2B marketing, which will increasingly drive the industry.
Thanks in large part to the successful inroads B2B influencer marketing have made for brands looking to reach younger audiences, when an influencer recommends a product, 51 percent of Millennials say they are more likely to try it, according to research data from Valassis and Kantar.
Gen Z and Millennial B2B marketers who have grown up with newer social media platforms are occupying ever-more positions of power all the way up to corporate marketing management — a move that has helped today’s B2B marketing look decidedly different from that of even five years ago.
Snapchat recently published a study exploring brand expectations among Gen Z, finding that 82 percent of the demographic want brands to act on customer feedback, while a similar report from Campaign Monitor also found Gen Z’s social media platform preferences to differ from those of older generations.
[bctt tweet=”“the B2B marketing of 2020 has left boring in the dust, replaced with exciting and truly memorable content experiences.” — Lane R. Ellis @lanerellis” username=”toprank”]
6 — B2B Marketing Should Never Include Interactive or Experiential Content
The Myth:
B2B audiences don’t expect or even want interactive or experiential content when it comes to brand messaging — they want only dense black-and-white case studies of at least 200 pages, or white papers filled with serious professional business information.
The Myth-Buster:
B2B audiences have been starved for interactive and experiential content for far too long, and in recent years have come to expect much more B2C-like digital experiences which incorporate truly entertaining, memorable, and interactive elements.
With 98 percent of consumers more likely to make a purchase after an experience (Limelight), and 77 percent having chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that delivers a personalized service or experience (Forrester), more B2B marketers have begun to use experiential content.
In 2020 experiential content comes in many forms, with just a few examples being:
Virtual Reality (VR)
Augmented Reality (AR)
Cloud-Based Digital Assets from Ceros and Other Platforms
Quizzes and Polls
Interactive Flipbooks and eBooks
Experiential content is also intertwined with both storytelling and customer experience (CX), together becoming an extremely powerful triptych of B2B marketing strategy.
You can take a closer look at the growing field of B2B experiential marketing here:
[bctt tweet=”“Experiential content makes us a central part of a story, and not just a passive subject receiving a one-way brand message.” — Lane R. Ellis @lanerellis” username=”toprank”]
7 — B2B Marketing Doesn’t Have Influencers
The Myth:
Influencers don’t exist in B2B marketing, because they are only for hawking cosmetics and pushing designer clothing lines on Instagram — what relevance could influencers really have in the professional B2B world?
Influencer marketing will see global brand spending up to $15 billion by 2022 (Business Insider Intelligence), and with more people using social media and spending greater amounts of time doing so, B2B influencers have a bigger audience than ever.
[bctt tweet=”“The output of B2B influencer collaboration can be in any form that the brand is currently publishing content: text, video, visual, audio, interactive and even VR.” @LeeOdden” username=”toprank”]
Learn more about B2B influencer marketing with these insightful looks at how brands are using it to achieve success, and dig in to recent influencer marketing statistics here:
8 — B2B Marketing is Pointless & Impossible For Brands Than Aren’t Billion-Dollar Firms
The Myth:
B2B marketing is only for billion-dollar mega-corporations looking to attract other massive Fortune 500 firms — and it doesn’t have any relevance for a company with less than 10,000 employees.
The Myth-Buster:
It doesn’t take billion-dollar firms to create priceless B2B marketing efforts. Indeed, some of the most successful and memorable B2B marketing campaigns are coming from small-to-midsize firms, especially those that are using B2B influencer marketing.
Our content strategist Anne Leuman recently took a look at “5 Examples of Effective B2B Content Marketing in Times of Crisis,” featuring several smaller firms including HealthcareSource and our client monday.com, showing how they are putting out timely and helpful marketing messages during the pandemic.
Social media and influencer marketing have helped level the playing field not only among large B2C and B2B firms, but smaller B2B businesses as well.
Being savvy and nimble can propel a business a long way in the B2B marketing world — perhaps even over land and water, as Shakespeare once noted.
[bctt tweet=”“Nimble thought can jump both sea and land.” — William Shakespeare” username=”toprank”]
9 — B2B Marketing Isn’t Even Well-Suited for Social Media
The Myth:
B2B marketers shouldn’t even use social media, since business audiences don’t use social platforms, or if they do, they’re not there to find serious B2B information.
The Myth-Buster:
Nearly everyone uses social media in 2020, with global active social media users topping the 3.8 billion mark recently, and that includes almost all the business professionals in every B2B industry.
Social media and B2B marketing go hand-in-hand these days, and smart marketers recognize the importance of this intertwined system, and work hard to inform and delight on every social channel where their brand’s customers are actively engaging.
[bctt tweet=”“It doesn’t take billion-dollar firms to create priceless B2B marketing efforts.” — Lane R. Ellis @lanerellis” username=”toprank”]
10 — B2B Marketing’s Only Real Channel is LinkedIn
The Myth:
LinkedIn is the only social media platform B2B marketers ever need to use, because it’s the only one those in B2B industries ever really utilize.
The Myth-Buster:
While it’s true that LinkedIn is the top social media platform for B2B marketers and professionals in general, and still represents the go-to source for business information when it comes to social — and we’re not just saying that because they are a TopRank Marketing client — if you’re limiting your efforts solely to LinkedIn you’re missing out on key industry players who happen to spend the majority of their social media time on other platforms.
As we’ve shown above, there are a wide array of social media channels B2B marketers are finding vital to their brand efforts. With every Fortune 500 firm now represented on LinkedIn, however, it’s a platform that should be included in every B2B marketer’s mix.
Soar Beyond B2B Myths With Powerful Marketing Tactics
Now that we’ve made an effort to dispel these 10 common B2B marketing myths, we hope that you’ll be better able to power your next marketing campaign using the tactics we’ve looked at, and create B2B content that inspires and enchants while also providing best-answer solutions.
Uncertainty for some is opportunity for others. While much is being said about changes in influencer marketing approach and B2C influencers losing work at scale because events are now cancelled and industries like retail, travel and hospitality have been disrupted due to COVID-19, consumer behavior has decidedly shifted towards digital experiences.
While in-person events have been a staple for B2B marketers, we’ve seen how working with digital influencers on co-created content can be a sound alternative.
How brands approach marketing during a crisis makes the issue of trust even more important. When planned and implemented effectively, B2B influencer marketing programs build trust and confidence for buyers, influencers and the brand.
At the same time B2B marketers are emphasizing purpose and people over profit in their marketing messages, the need to deliver on new business and revenue hasn’t gone away. Here are 4 considerations on how B2B influencer programs can be optimized, while still being empathetic and thoughtful to the new normal.
1. Find the opportunity gap.
Any marketing investment during a time of crisis will be under scrutiny. Whether your business has had to pivot or you reacting to changes in buyer behavior, it’s essential to find opportunities to provide value in ways that are truly empathetic to customers and that can drive business performance. Many companies are meeting a boost in demand for information by engaging influencers to provide thought leadership, insights and how-to content.
Also, as you plan what kind of influencer program to run, think about what goal represents an opportunity for the best ratio of importance for executives to business and customer impact relative to resources and time frame? What metrics best represents that goal?
2. Build amplification in the creation.
If you are able to secure budget and support for a business influencer campaign or program, make sure you are realizing the full value of the content reach. Structure the influencer content for easy deconstruction to shareable formats including social messages, graphics, animations and repurposed content. Also, work with business influencers who have proven distribution channels and can republish brand content on their own networks and sites. The great content you can co-create with influencers won’t be so great if the right audiences are not seeing it.
3. Maximize the content experience.
One of the big trends in B2B influencer marketing has been more interesting content formats. Think outside the box of ebooks and blog posts to visually rich and interactive content including audio, video and even VR/AR. There has been a rush of business influencers livestreaming video on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Brands should think about how they can differentiate the content experience they are creating for their customers and influencers alike. Impressive content inspires influencers to share even more plus it improves customer engagement.
4. Deliver a better influencer experience.
Experience is more important than ever, not just for customers but for influencers as well. Far too often, B2B companies treat influencers as a commodity and only think of what the brand wants. Here’s a novel idea: Provide top shelf service to your influencers to help them be more successful concomitant to the success of your influencer program. Find out what the influencers’ goals are and build a community around shared values with your influencers. Share promotion messages and goals with influencers and encourage a team approach vs one to one communications. Think more “we” vs. “me”.
Rani Mani, Monica Grant and the team at Adobe do a fantastic job of this with the #AdobeInsiders program.
These opportunities to optimize B2B marketing performance are not unique to marketing during a time of crisis. They are universally useful in any environment. But with so many companies and individuals facing uncertainty. it’s essential that businesses optimize for trust and what better way than to work with those who already have the trust and attention of customers?
Uncertainty for some is opportunity for others. While much is being said about changes in influencer marketing approach and B2C influencers losing work at scale because events are now cancelled and industries like retail, travel and hospitality have been disrupted due to COVID-19, consumer behavior has decidedly shifted towards digital experiences.
While in-person events have been a staple for B2B marketers, we’ve seen how working with digital influencers on co-created content can be a sound alternative.
How brands approach marketing during a crisis makes the issue of trust even more important. When planned and implemented effectively, B2B influencer marketing programs build trust and confidence for buyers, influencers and the brand.
At the same time B2B marketers are emphasizing purpose and people over profit in their marketing messages, the need to deliver on new business and revenue hasn’t gone away. Here are 4 considerations on how B2B influencer programs can be optimized, while still being empathetic and thoughtful to the new normal.
1. Find the opportunity gap.
Any marketing investment during a time of crisis will be under scrutiny. Whether your business has had to pivot or you reacting to changes in buyer behavior, it’s essential to find opportunities to provide value in ways that are truly empathetic to customers and that can drive business performance. Many companies are meeting a boost in demand for information by engaging influencers to provide thought leadership, insights and how-to content.
Also, as you plan what kind of influencer program to run, think about what goal represents an opportunity for the best ratio of importance for executives to business and customer impact relative to resources and time frame? What metrics best represents that goal?
2. Build amplification in the creation.
If you are able to secure budget and support for a business influencer campaign or program, make sure you are realizing the full value of the content reach. Structure the influencer content for easy deconstruction to shareable formats including social messages, graphics, animations and repurposed content. Also, work with business influencers who have proven distribution channels and can republish brand content on their own networks and sites. The great content you can co-create with influencers won’t be so great if the right audiences are not seeing it.
3. Maximize the content experience.
One of the big trends in B2B influencer marketing has been more interesting content formats. Think outside the box of ebooks and blog posts to visually rich and interactive content including audio, video and even VR/AR. There has been a rush of business influencers livestreaming video on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Brands should think about how they can differentiate the content experience they are creating for their customers and influencers alike. Impressive content inspires influencers to share even more plus it improves customer engagement.
4. Deliver a better influencer experience.
Experience is more important than ever, not just for customers but for influencers as well. Far too often, B2B companies treat influencers as a commodity and only think of what the brand wants. Here’s a novel idea: Provide top shelf service to your influencers to help them be more successful concomitant to the success of your influencer program. Find out what the influencers’ goals are and build a community around shared values with your influencers. Share promotion messages and goals with influencers and encourage a team approach vs one to one communications. Think more “we” vs. “me”.
Rani Mani, Monica Grant and the team at Adobe do a fantastic job of this with the #AdobeInsiders program.
These opportunities to optimize B2B marketing performance are not unique to marketing during a time of crisis. They are universally useful in any environment. But with so many companies and individuals facing uncertainty. it’s essential that businesses optimize for trust and what better way than to work with those who already have the trust and attention of customers?
How to use LinkedIn Ads’ new company targeting options to boost B2B lead generation
LinkedIn (client) recently rolled out additional targeting options for advertisers, allowing LinkedIn Ad users access to new Company Category B2B data comprised of Forbes, Fortune and platform data, along with the addition of growth rate targeting information. Search Engine Land
Report: Majority of B2B Marketers to Continue Investment in Data Quality in 2020
75 percent of B2B marketers plan to up their investment in data quality during 2020, while 90 percent said they view such investment leading to improved marketing and sales performance — two of the numerous findings of interest to digital marketers contained in recently-released Dun & Bradstreet report data. Chief Marketer
How COVID-19 Is Impacting Marketing Budgets at Enterprise Companies
B2B marketers expect to shift investment primarily to virtual events (78%), web content (72%), webinars (67%) and social media (66%) because of the pandemic, according to recently-released April enterprise-level company survey data. MarketingProfs
How COVID-19 has changed social media engagement [Report]
Sprout Social’s new pandemic-era data shows that LinkedIn posts perform the best on Wednesdays at 3pm, Thursdays from 9-10am, and Friday from 11am to noon, and that the media and entertainment industry has been publishing almost 9 more posts daily, according to new social media engagement data on interest to marketers. Sprout Social
Twitter Publishes New Data on Video and Ad Content Performance During COVID-19
Twitter increased its monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) by 23 percent during the quarter, and saw video view rates that rose by 5.5 percent, two of the findings in newly-released brand COVID-19 trend data. Social Media Today
Facebook Adds New ‘Animate’ Option to Add Motion to Still Images in Facebook Stories
Facebook has released new zoom, pan and other animation modes that bring marketers a variety of additional Facebook Stories options, and has also begun testing several new mood-based content reaction options, the social media giant recently announced. Social Media Today
YouTube Influencer Engagement Rate Benchmarks: What Are Good Rates?
Various YouTube channel categories sport a wide range of differing engagement benchmarks, according to recently-released YouTube influencer engagement rate report data, which also reveals that micro-influencers on the video platform can often achieve high engagement marks. MarketingCharts
LinkedIn Publishes Data on Latest Content Engagement Trends on the Platform
LinkedIn has released new content trend engagement data, including a breakdown by global regions that shows what the platform’s audience is looking for and engaging with, with pandemic-related content having seen some of the biggest increases in quantity, the firm announced. Social Media Today
Coronavirus reshapes consumer habits, creating 4 new segments, report finds
25 percent of consumers said they would pay more to buy from trusted brands and 23 percent from ethical brands — two of numerous findings of interest to digital marketers in newly-released Ernst & Young pandemic marketing report data. Marketing Dive
Facebook Outlines a Range of New Video Tools, Including Messenger Rooms for Group Video Hangouts
Facebook recently announced a variety of video-related updates to its numerous social communications properties, including a change which will allow up to 8 people to have WhatsApp video calls, while Messenger video received new virtual background options, among several other video feature updates. Social Media Today
ON THE LIGHTER SIDE:
A lighthearted look at our brand promise by Marketoonist Tom Fishburne — Marketoonist
Chiquita lets Spotify users unlock music playlists, branded prizes — Mobile Marketer
TOPRANK MARKETING & CLIENTS IN THE NEWS:
Lee Odden — 10 Expert Tips for Marketing During a Crisis — Oracle (client)
Lee Odden — 4 takeaways for content marketers in the time of COVID-19 — Search Engine Land
Lee Odden — 5 Hours of Content Marketing – Break Free of Boring B2B with Influential Content Experiences — SEMrush
Thanks for taking time to join us, and we hope you will join us again next Friday for more of the most relevant B2B and digital marketing industry news. In the meantime, you can follow us at @toprank on Twitter for even more timely daily news. Also, don’t miss the full video summary on our TopRank Marketing TV YouTube Channel.
How to use LinkedIn Ads’ new company targeting options to boost B2B lead generation
LinkedIn (client) recently rolled out additional targeting options for advertisers, allowing LinkedIn Ad users access to new Company Category B2B data comprised of Forbes, Fortune and platform data, along with the addition of growth rate targeting information. Search Engine Land
Report: Majority of B2B Marketers to Continue Investment in Data Quality in 2020
75 percent of B2B marketers plan to up their investment in data quality during 2020, while 90 percent said they view such investment leading to improved marketing and sales performance — two of the numerous findings of interest to digital marketers contained in recently-released Dun & Bradstreet report data. Chief Marketer
How COVID-19 Is Impacting Marketing Budgets at Enterprise Companies
B2B marketers expect to shift investment primarily to virtual events (78%), web content (72%), webinars (67%) and social media (66%) because of the pandemic, according to recently-released April enterprise-level company survey data. MarketingProfs
How COVID-19 has changed social media engagement [Report]
Sprout Social’s new pandemic-era data shows that LinkedIn posts perform the best on Wednesdays at 3pm, Thursdays from 9-10am, and Friday from 11am to noon, and that the media and entertainment industry has been publishing almost 9 more posts daily, according to new social media engagement data on interest to marketers. Sprout Social
Twitter Publishes New Data on Video and Ad Content Performance During COVID-19
Twitter increased its monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) by 23 percent during the quarter, and saw video view rates that rose by 5.5 percent, two of the findings in newly-released brand COVID-19 trend data. Social Media Today
Facebook Adds New ‘Animate’ Option to Add Motion to Still Images in Facebook Stories
Facebook has released new zoom, pan and other animation modes that bring marketers a variety of additional Facebook Stories options, and has also begun testing several new mood-based content reaction options, the social media giant recently announced. Social Media Today
YouTube Influencer Engagement Rate Benchmarks: What Are Good Rates?
Various YouTube channel categories sport a wide range of differing engagement benchmarks, according to recently-released YouTube influencer engagement rate report data, which also reveals that micro-influencers on the video platform can often achieve high engagement marks. MarketingCharts
LinkedIn Publishes Data on Latest Content Engagement Trends on the Platform
LinkedIn has released new content trend engagement data, including a breakdown by global regions that shows what the platform’s audience is looking for and engaging with, with pandemic-related content having seen some of the biggest increases in quantity, the firm announced. Social Media Today
Coronavirus reshapes consumer habits, creating 4 new segments, report finds
25 percent of consumers said they would pay more to buy from trusted brands and 23 percent from ethical brands — two of numerous findings of interest to digital marketers in newly-released Ernst & Young pandemic marketing report data. Marketing Dive
Facebook Outlines a Range of New Video Tools, Including Messenger Rooms for Group Video Hangouts
Facebook recently announced a variety of video-related updates to its numerous social communications properties, including a change which will allow up to 8 people to have WhatsApp video calls, while Messenger video received new virtual background options, among several other video feature updates. Social Media Today
ON THE LIGHTER SIDE:
A lighthearted look at our brand promise by Marketoonist Tom Fishburne — Marketoonist
Chiquita lets Spotify users unlock music playlists, branded prizes — Mobile Marketer
TOPRANK MARKETING & CLIENTS IN THE NEWS:
Lee Odden — 10 Expert Tips for Marketing During a Crisis — Oracle (client)
Lee Odden — 4 takeaways for content marketers in the time of COVID-19 — Search Engine Land
Lee Odden — 5 Hours of Content Marketing – Break Free of Boring B2B with Influential Content Experiences — SEMrush
Thanks for taking time to join us, and we hope you will join us again next Friday for more of the most relevant B2B and digital marketing industry news. In the meantime, you can follow us at @toprank on Twitter for even more timely daily news. Also, don’t miss the full video summary on our TopRank Marketing TV YouTube Channel.
There has been no greater disruption to business in the modern era than the COVID-19 pandemic. For many, it seems as though the world has stopped turning. For marketers, it seems as though now is the worst time to try to promote anything.
But as our CEO, Lee Odden, said, “While there will be a period of adjustment, these changes do not mean the work stops. It doesn’t mean companies don’t need information, solutions, support, products and services.”
And he couldn’t be more right. Your audience may even have a greater need now for your solutions or expertise. They’re trying to navigate through this uncertain time, too. And they’re looking for help now more than ever before.
To help you answer those calls for help and know what types of content are successful in times of crisis, I’ve gathered five examples of effective B2B content marketing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
#1 – HealthcareSource
Healthcare workers have always been essential. And with a pandemic afoot, they’ve become the most essential. As a result, hospitals and healthcare providers need to ensure they’re fully staffed, but that’s easier said than done. Declining revenues have led to job cuts. Doctors catching the virus has led to job growth. Hiring for healthcare is undergoing constant fluctuations.
As a proven talent management software for healthcare providers, HealthcareSource saw that they were in a unique position to help. Through a long, thoughtful blog post, loaded with examples from healthcare systems around the world, HealthcareSource created a great resource to help healthcare organizations manage their hiring, onboarding, and talent acquisition strategies. They also created an on-demand webinar with in-depth tactics on how to manage these constant fluctuations in job demand and supply.
#2 – Zoom
Zoom, a favorite video conferencing tool for any organization, has seen their number of daily active users jump from only 10 million to over 200 million in just three months. They’ve grown from hosting business meetings to hosting virtual classes, happy hours among friends, family game nights, and more for hundreds of millions of people. COVID-19 and social distancing have invariably helped grow their user base. However, that comes with its own set of challenges.
They now have to train hundreds of millions of people on how to use Zoom, how to adjust their mic settings, how to ensure their Zoom is secure and private. They’re users needed support, fast. So they created an in-depth COVID-19 resource with every relevant training users could need. But what makes this resource even more helpful is that they segmented it based on use-cases. Need help while working remotely? You have your own section. Need help teaching your class? You have your own section, too. It’s a great example of how tailoring content for each audience segment creates a better experience; help is easier to find and the experience feels more personalized.
[bctt tweet=”“Tailoring content for each audience segment creates a better experience.” — Anne Leuman @annieleuman” username=”toprank”]
#3 – monday.com*
Lockdown. Quarantine. Social distancing. Between those three mandates, it’s clear to see why the number of people working remotely is reaching unprecedented heights. For monday.com, a work operating system provider, this presented an interesting opportunity. They saw that teams needed help transitioning to a remote work environment with the least amount of friction. They needed help ensuring they had the right technology, process, and structures to make remote work successful. They needed help knowing how to best use monday.com remotely instead of in a physical office.
To ease the remote work transition, monday.com created a new page on their website educating others on how to use their software for remote work. This new page helps existing clients and potential prospects on how monday.com can help ease the challenges of working remotely. They also made the smart decision of adding this page to their main site navigation, making it extremely easy for visitors to access. In addition to this new product page, the team at monday.com also created a custom video and content hub to ensure their users can get answers to all of their questions.
*monday.com is a TopRank Marketing client.
#4 – Slack
Slack was already a popular piece of software for any business, helping streamline team communications and collaboration. With more workers at home, I’m sure businesses — including our own — have become even more reliant on Slack to carry the burden of all text communication between teams. And while they could have taken a page from Zoom or monday.com and created dedicated resources to help train new users or customers who may be relying on Slack a bit more during this time, they didn’t. They saw a different opportunity to help their audience.
During a crisis, the value of information skyrockets. Business leaders want to know; what’s happening to the economy? Will their market be impacted? How is this affecting their workforce? Slack created a report to help answer those questions, especially as it relates to remote workers and the challenges they face. They recognized that key decision makers in their target audience desired more information to help them solve top challenges like transitioning to remote work, improving their employee experience, and more. With this report, they were able to provide those insights, helping their audience optimize how they work together during a pandemic.
#5 – Dropbox
Do you know what distributed work is? I didn’t know what it was, either. And this is where Dropbox’s latest content marketing really shines.
Dropbox saw that while most of the world was focusing on transitioning to remote work, they really needed to focus on distributed work. Organizations sorely needed to be educated on the difference between the two and how they require different strategies. As Dropbox points out, “remote work is a discipline for the individual worker, but distributed work is a discipline for the entire organization.” That’s a very important distinction to make as organizations attempt to navigate social distancing and still get the work done.
Their thought leadership content around distributed work is truly eye-opening. Positioned high up on their blog and given its own content hub, their distributed work content is a must-read for any organization operating remotely during this time. And it all happened because they recognized a key, relevant term that not many were focusing on.
Be Helpful. Be Successful.
The true key to success in B2B content marketing is to always come from a place of empathy. The more you’re able to understand and empathize with your target audience, the more likely you are to surface content opportunities that help them overcome their pain points and challenges. And helping them = success.
That doesn’t change even in times of crisis. In fact, it becomes all the more important. Use the B2B content marketing examples above as a guide when creating your own content and remember to be empathetic to their needs.
There has been no greater disruption to business in the modern era than the COVID-19 pandemic. For many, it seems as though the world has stopped turning. For marketers, it seems as though now is the worst time to try to promote anything.
But as our CEO, Lee Odden, said, “While there will be a period of adjustment, these changes do not mean the work stops. It doesn’t mean companies don’t need information, solutions, support, products and services.”
And he couldn’t be more right. Your audience may even have a greater need now for your solutions or expertise. They’re trying to navigate through this uncertain time, too. And they’re looking for help now more than ever before.
To help you answer those calls for help and know what types of content are successful in times of crisis, I’ve gathered five examples of effective B2B content marketing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
#1 – HealthcareSource
Healthcare workers have always been essential. And with a pandemic afoot, they’ve become the most essential. As a result, hospitals and healthcare providers need to ensure they’re fully staffed, but that’s easier said than done. Declining revenues have led to job cuts. Doctors catching the virus has led to job growth. Hiring for healthcare is undergoing constant fluctuations.
As a proven talent management software for healthcare providers, HealthcareSource saw that they were in a unique position to help. Through a long, thoughtful blog post, loaded with examples from healthcare systems around the world, HealthcareSource created a great resource to help healthcare organizations manage their hiring, onboarding, and talent acquisition strategies. They also created an on-demand webinar with in-depth tactics on how to manage these constant fluctuations in job demand and supply.
#2 – Zoom
Zoom, a favorite video conferencing tool for any organization, has seen their number of daily active users jump from only 10 million to over 200 million in just three months. They’ve grown from hosting business meetings to hosting virtual classes, happy hours among friends, family game nights, and more for hundreds of millions of people. COVID-19 and social distancing have invariably helped grow their user base. However, that comes with its own set of challenges.
They now have to train hundreds of millions of people on how to use Zoom, how to adjust their mic settings, how to ensure their Zoom is secure and private. They’re users needed support, fast. So they created an in-depth COVID-19 resource with every relevant training users could need. But what makes this resource even more helpful is that they segmented it based on use-cases. Need help while working remotely? You have your own section. Need help teaching your class? You have your own section, too. It’s a great example of how tailoring content for each audience segment creates a better experience; help is easier to find and the experience feels more personalized.
[bctt tweet=”“Tailoring content for each audience segment creates a better experience.” — Anne Leuman @annieleuman” username=”toprank”]
#3 – monday.com*
Lockdown. Quarantine. Social distancing. Between those three mandates, it’s clear to see why the number of people working remotely is reaching unprecedented heights. For monday.com, a work operating system provider, this presented an interesting opportunity. They saw that teams needed help transitioning to a remote work environment with the least amount of friction. They needed help ensuring they had the right technology, process, and structures to make remote work successful. They needed help knowing how to best use monday.com remotely instead of in a physical office.
To ease the remote work transition, monday.com created a new page on their website educating others on how to use their software for remote work. This new page helps existing clients and potential prospects on how monday.com can help ease the challenges of working remotely. They also made the smart decision of adding this page to their main site navigation, making it extremely easy for visitors to access. In addition to this new product page, the team at monday.com also created a custom video and content hub to ensure their users can get answers to all of their questions.
*monday.com is a TopRank Marketing client.
#4 – Slack
Slack was already a popular piece of software for any business, helping streamline team communications and collaboration. With more workers at home, I’m sure businesses — including our own — have become even more reliant on Slack to carry the burden of all text communication between teams. And while they could have taken a page from Zoom or monday.com and created dedicated resources to help train new users or customers who may be relying on Slack a bit more during this time, they didn’t. They saw a different opportunity to help their audience.
During a crisis, the value of information skyrockets. Business leaders want to know; what’s happening to the economy? Will their market be impacted? How is this affecting their workforce? Slack created a report to help answer those questions, especially as it relates to remote workers and the challenges they face. They recognized that key decision makers in their target audience desired more information to help them solve top challenges like transitioning to remote work, improving their employee experience, and more. With this report, they were able to provide those insights, helping their audience optimize how they work together during a pandemic.
#5 – Dropbox
Do you know what distributed work is? I didn’t know what it was, either. And this is where Dropbox’s latest content marketing really shines.
Dropbox saw that while most of the world was focusing on transitioning to remote work, they really needed to focus on distributed work. Organizations sorely needed to be educated on the difference between the two and how they require different strategies. As Dropbox points out, “remote work is a discipline for the individual worker, but distributed work is a discipline for the entire organization.” That’s a very important distinction to make as organizations attempt to navigate social distancing and still get the work done.
Their thought leadership content around distributed work is truly eye-opening. Positioned high up on their blog and given its own content hub, their distributed work content is a must-read for any organization operating remotely during this time. And it all happened because they recognized a key, relevant term that not many were focusing on.
Be Helpful. Be Successful.
The true key to success in B2B content marketing is to always come from a place of empathy. The more you’re able to understand and empathize with your target audience, the more likely you are to surface content opportunities that help them overcome their pain points and challenges. And helping them = success.
That doesn’t change even in times of crisis. In fact, it becomes all the more important. Use the B2B content marketing examples above as a guide when creating your own content and remember to be empathetic to their needs.
When that DAM is digital asset management, you’re looking at a system that will improve all forms of online marketing, whether it’s B2B influencers, social, search, content, video or always-on marketing.
It’s also one of the top investments an organization can make for successfully leveraging a digital environment that will only expand with more data in the coming years.
It’s no wonder the global DAM market was valued at $3.4 billion in 2019, and is expected to reach $8.5 billion by 2025, according to report data from IMARC.
Just What Are Digital Assets?
As we explored in our introduction to DAM technology, “Why Digital Asset Management Matters in B2B Marketing,” digital assets are simply any computer files, stored anywhere — whether on your phone, tablet, desktop, network, or in the cloud.
DAM software runs either on a local computer network or in the cloud, and is built to pull in and make it easy to organize an unlimited number of files — all those digital assets that organizations create and use daily.
The more complex your marketing strategies and organization are, the greater the benefits of DAM will be, especially when accumulated over time.
The pandemic has also brought to light weaknesses for some organizations, as remote workers place additional strains on systems not necessarily designed for unified online access to digital asset libraries.
Let’s look at how adding a DAM system to your mix can help improve six major forms of digital marketing.
[bctt tweet=”“The more complex your marketing strategies and organization are, the greater the benefits of digital asset management (DAM) will be, especially over time.” — Lane R. Ellis @lanerellis” username=”toprank”]
1 — Use DAM to Augment Your Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing campaigns, especially in the B2B realm, can involve many people and projects, often with a variety of images, document files, videos, and other digital assets.
Tracking multiple versions of files — with varieties specifically created for each social media platform involved in a campaign — can get complicated, and many firms either use a cobbled together make-shift approach that may be known only to one or a few people in the organization, or end up bouncing around from one software solution to another.
A good DAM database, however, can be used company-wide and is expandable enough to accommodate any change in file types, for as long as the DAM is supported by its developers.
The best DAM solutions also offer transparent and robust import and especially export routines, so that organizations aren’t locked-in to one DAM environment with their digital assets held hostage, unable to easily migrate to other solutions if needed.
Influencer marketing benefits from DAM through increased efficiency and time savings, which ultimately make influencers happy and better able to share co-created content.
2 — Expand Your Content Marketing With DAM
The type of savvy content management offered by DAM systems could save marketing teams 13 days annually per staff member, according to report data from Canto.
The same research found that 41 percent of marketers said that digital filing inefficiencies had caused delayed project releases, and 54 percent noted that they experienced frustration with inefficient filing systems.
By its very nature content marketing involves vast quantities of content in all its various digital forms, and a powerful DAM system enhances content marketing by making it easy to find all the digital assets a business has ever created, both for current campaigns and when gathering past performance and return on investment (ROI) data.
3 — Make a Move to DAM to Improve Your Video Marketing
As with static digital assets, a good DAM system easily ingests and organizes video content, putting it at the fingertips of each person in an organization who needs it, from video editor to social media manager to corporate executives.
Digital video has remained a leading performer for marketers, with 92 percent saying it’s an important part of their marketing strategy (HubSpot), and with the arrival of the global health crisis initial reports have shown that more video than ever is being viewed, including 5.5 percent higher video view rates on Twitter.
One of the many benefits a top-notch DAM solution offers is the ability to find otherwise hidden static content in your organization’s archives that can work well in creating video marketing, oftentimes also avoiding time-consuming efforts to re-do work that has already been completed but can’t easily be found.
4 — DAM Shines in Always-On Marketing Environments
Always-on marketing replaces on-again off-again campaigns with a fluid ongoing effort, continually cultivating and carefully building efforts that allow businesses to seamlessly adapt their marketing efforts, rather than playing catch-up, stopping a campaign, and waiting to build a new one.
For B2B marketers, the shift to always-on is swiftly advancing, and in always-on marketing DAM shines brightly, as it removes many of the bottlenecks slowing down traditional marketing by offering easy and swift access to a firm’s digital asset archive.
[bctt tweet=”“Always On Influencer Marketing is a strategic approach to creating communities of trusted experts that is relationship and content focused.” @LeeOdden” username=”toprank”]
5 — Search Marketers Find Success with DAM
Search marketers also benefit from a powerful DAM system, being able to systematically find search campaign assets, analytics data contained in spreadsheets or other formats, in ways that help make more data-informed search marketing efforts a snap.
In a way the so-called findability of search marketing goes hand-in-hand with a smart DAM solution, as both are centered around finding things — whether in the form of search engine query answers or finding a file you know you have but haven’t been able to successfully locate until the arrival of a DAM system.
6 — B2B Marketers Get Social with DAM
Social media marketers too can gain advantages by using a DAM workflow, easily accessing digital assets destined for a variety of social platforms, whether they involve static or video content, advertising copy in text documents, or social analytics data in any number of file formats.
Social media marketing is also enhanced by DAM through time savings, but also by the extra insight it can bring helping to open up an organization’s digital asset library. Re-purposing content on social platforms can take on an entirely new and all-encompassing level when every digital asset can easily come in to play and be combined in relevant new ways, thanks to a powerful DAM system.
Invest in Your Firm’s Long-Term Success Using DAM
Whether you specialize in B2B influencer marketing, social, search, content, video or always-on efforts — or a combination of these primary digital marketing practices — finding and implementing the right digital asset management system is an investment in the long-term success of your organization.
Finally, to help you learn more about DAM solutions for marketers, including a list of many of the top providers, have a look at our article exploring the subject.
When that DAM is digital asset management, you’re looking at a system that will improve all forms of online marketing, whether it’s B2B influencers, social, search, content, video or always-on marketing.
It’s also one of the top investments an organization can make for successfully leveraging a digital environment that will only expand with more data in the coming years.
It’s no wonder the global DAM market was valued at $3.4 billion in 2019, and is expected to reach $8.5 billion by 2025, according to report data from IMARC.
Just What Are Digital Assets?
As we explored in our introduction to DAM technology, “Why Digital Asset Management Matters in B2B Marketing,” digital assets are simply any computer files, stored anywhere — whether on your phone, tablet, desktop, network, or in the cloud.
DAM software runs either on a local computer network or in the cloud, and is built to pull in and make it easy to organize an unlimited number of files — all those digital assets that organizations create and use daily.
The more complex your marketing strategies and organization are, the greater the benefits of DAM will be, especially when accumulated over time.
The pandemic has also brought to light weaknesses for some organizations, as remote workers place additional strains on systems not necessarily designed for unified online access to digital asset libraries.
Let’s look at how adding a DAM system to your mix can help improve six major forms of digital marketing.
[bctt tweet=”“The more complex your marketing strategies and organization are, the greater the benefits of digital asset management (DAM) will be, especially over time.” — Lane R. Ellis @lanerellis” username=”toprank”]
1 — Use DAM to Augment Your Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing campaigns, especially in the B2B realm, can involve many people and projects, often with a variety of images, document files, videos, and other digital assets.
Tracking multiple versions of files — with varieties specifically created for each social media platform involved in a campaign — can get complicated, and many firms either use a cobbled together make-shift approach that may be known only to one or a few people in the organization, or end up bouncing around from one software solution to another.
A good DAM database, however, can be used company-wide and is expandable enough to accommodate any change in file types, for as long as the DAM is supported by its developers.
The best DAM solutions also offer transparent and robust import and especially export routines, so that organizations aren’t locked-in to one DAM environment with their digital assets held hostage, unable to easily migrate to other solutions if needed.
Influencer marketing benefits from DAM through increased efficiency and time savings, which ultimately make influencers happy and better able to share co-created content.
2 — Expand Your Content Marketing With DAM
The type of savvy content management offered by DAM systems could save marketing teams 13 days annually per staff member, according to report data from Canto.
The same research found that 41 percent of marketers said that digital filing inefficiencies had caused delayed project releases, and 54 percent noted that they experienced frustration with inefficient filing systems.
By its very nature content marketing involves vast quantities of content in all its various digital forms, and a powerful DAM system enhances content marketing by making it easy to find all the digital assets a business has ever created, both for current campaigns and when gathering past performance and return on investment (ROI) data.
3 — Make a Move to DAM to Improve Your Video Marketing
As with static digital assets, a good DAM system easily ingests and organizes video content, putting it at the fingertips of each person in an organization who needs it, from video editor to social media manager to corporate executives.
Digital video has remained a leading performer for marketers, with 92 percent saying it’s an important part of their marketing strategy (HubSpot), and with the arrival of the global health crisis initial reports have shown that more video than ever is being viewed, including 5.5 percent higher video view rates on Twitter.
One of the many benefits a top-notch DAM solution offers is the ability to find otherwise hidden static content in your organization’s archives that can work well in creating video marketing, oftentimes also avoiding time-consuming efforts to re-do work that has already been completed but can’t easily be found.
4 — DAM Shines in Always-On Marketing Environments
Always-on marketing replaces on-again off-again campaigns with a fluid ongoing effort, continually cultivating and carefully building efforts that allow businesses to seamlessly adapt their marketing efforts, rather than playing catch-up, stopping a campaign, and waiting to build a new one.
For B2B marketers, the shift to always-on is swiftly advancing, and in always-on marketing DAM shines brightly, as it removes many of the bottlenecks slowing down traditional marketing by offering easy and swift access to a firm’s digital asset archive.
[bctt tweet=”“Always On Influencer Marketing is a strategic approach to creating communities of trusted experts that is relationship and content focused.” @LeeOdden” username=”toprank”]
5 — Search Marketers Find Success with DAM
Search marketers also benefit from a powerful DAM system, being able to systematically find search campaign assets, analytics data contained in spreadsheets or other formats, in ways that help make more data-informed search marketing efforts a snap.
In a way the so-called findability of search marketing goes hand-in-hand with a smart DAM solution, as both are centered around finding things — whether in the form of search engine query answers or finding a file you know you have but haven’t been able to successfully locate until the arrival of a DAM system.
6 — B2B Marketers Get Social with DAM
Social media marketers too can gain advantages by using a DAM workflow, easily accessing digital assets destined for a variety of social platforms, whether they involve static or video content, advertising copy in text documents, or social analytics data in any number of file formats.
Social media marketing is also enhanced by DAM through time savings, but also by the extra insight it can bring helping to open up an organization’s digital asset library. Re-purposing content on social platforms can take on an entirely new and all-encompassing level when every digital asset can easily come in to play and be combined in relevant new ways, thanks to a powerful DAM system.
Invest in Your Firm’s Long-Term Success Using DAM
Whether you specialize in B2B influencer marketing, social, search, content, video or always-on efforts — or a combination of these primary digital marketing practices — finding and implementing the right digital asset management system is an investment in the long-term success of your organization.
Finally, to help you learn more about DAM solutions for marketers, including a list of many of the top providers, have a look at our article exploring the subject.
