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Every year, it seems marketers get fixated on one or two “big things.” These trends tend to dominate conversations and airwaves until they’ve either died out, or we’ve collectively said everything that can be said about them and have moved onto something more timely. A few years ago it was Twitter. Then it was inbound marketing. This year, thanks to new market entrants like Meerkat and Periscope, it’s live streaming video. While many of marketing’s digital best practices hold firm, the tools and strategies continue to evolve. Here are two growing marketing trends we can’t stop talking about:
Gamification
Gamification recognizes the power of goal setting, feedback and rewards and uses them to drive excitement and engagement. Elements of gamification can intrigue and engage prospects, and may be even more valuable to internal marketing efforts.
In external marketing efforts, gamification can be used to drive lead engagement with website content and help you collect valuable lead information. For example, multinational software firm SAP used gamified elements to build an online community of brand advocates. The rewards for engagement with microsite content included the chance for frequently active community members to gain a designation as an “expert” in different areas. As users progressed through the site, SAP captured valuable information about their users’ buying needs and preferences.
Internally, gamification can be harnessed to drive marketing and sales usage of a CRM and the achievement of individual and company goals. For example, you might use gamification elements, such as leaderboards and scoreboards, to motivate continued job training, achievement of sales goals and improvements in customer service, and then align these with technologies like your CRM platform.
While gamification is not brand new, it is still coming into its own in B2B and healthcare marketing. Is your business on top of this trend?
Live streaming video
Meerkat and Periscope have taken entertainment, politics and consumer marketing by storm, but is there a place for live streaming video in the B2B and healthcare worlds? We think so. Meerkat and Periscope can be used to do more than simply broadcast the concert you attended last night. They can be leveraged to create engaging live streams of things like product demonstrations, interviews with your top executives and conference keynotes, thereby humanizing your brand and building live, real-time relationships with targets you could never hope to interact with personally. But beware of putting too many eggs in the live streaming video basket. While you may want to experiment with tools like Periscope and Meerkat now, it probably doesn’t make sense to make a large investment until a significant portion of your target customers begin to actively use live streaming apps.
Today, marketing tools and trends are changing faster than ever. As a B2B marketer, how do you process this accelerated change in the industry? Download our whitepaper to learn more:
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Compelling messages and attention-grabbing creative are great, but if they’re not delivered through the correct channels, what’s the point? Your campaigns will never reach your target customers unless they’re delivered based on a data-driven channel strategy that focuses on finding the best vehicles for the job.
To optimize the channels through which you deliver your next campaign, evaluate data from your own past efforts and take a look at what’s working for others in your industry.
Here are a few channels where top B2B and healthcare marketers have found standout success recently:
LUMEDX: using webinars to drive customer contacts
Healthcare technology company LUMEDX has a small staff but a large range of product offerings for cardiovascular information and imaging. To stand out in the face of competition from much larger brands, LUMEDX created a webinar-based lead generation campaign. The lead generation campaign stimulated over $600,000 in annual sales and led to increased contact with hundreds of clients.
If your company hasn’t considered webinars as a lead generation tool, it may be time to look into your options. Business and healthcare decision-makers are managing large budgets and need to make educated decisions about their service providers, especially when making high-value purchases. Webinars are an excellent way to connect with these potential clients and share valuable information. They can be a strong component of a cross-channel educational content campaign.
Agco: research reveals a lead generation opportunity in online video
Agco’s brands manufacture and supply agricultural machinery. After careful analysis revealed heavy YouTube use among the brand’s target customers, Agco decided to build an outreach strategy for this channel. The strategy, which included support, training and demonstration videos as well as videos about the future of agricultural technology, drove about $10 billion in sales.
The lesson from Agco’s campaign is in the careful research they conducted before launch. This research revealed that many farmers were already producing videos for YouTube showing how they used Agco products, and that there was a significant audience for this type of content. Agco didn’t enter into a new channel blindly, and your brand shouldn’t either.
Merck: using an educational portal to engage medical professionals
Merck (known as Merck Sharp & Dohme outside the U.S.) needed a way to reach healthcare professionals across countries and languages. To do so, they created Univadis, a hub for unbiased, relevant medical news from respected journals including The Lancet and The JAMA Network. To keep the site’s users engaged, Merck created a “self-learning” email marketing program that tailored email frequency to users’ behavior on the site and their medical specialty. The campaign included multi-touch reactivation messaging for lapsed users, which reactivated 35% of the U.K. user base in seven months. When the email marketing was optimized for mobile, engagement increased 64%.
By creating a site that provided valuable educational materials on health-related topics and delivering those materials via a smart marketing automation strategy, Merck established their credentials and built their following.
What content would fill a similar need for your audience? Host industry-relevant content on your own brand’s site or create a campaign microsite and use it to build thought leadership. Your business may create this content, strategically partner with other content creators, or both.
In each of these cases, the business in question chose one key channel that their research indicated could be successful and created a campaign that was well-suited to it. Then, other channels were layered into the campaign to strengthen its impact.
Cross-channel campaigns are most effective when tied to a strong brand and a robust digital marketing strategy. Learn more about how Movéo can help build your brand:
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Since the early days of email marketing, just about every industry has jumped on board. Marketing messages swamp work and personal inboxes, and it takes a lot more to stand out than it once did. Last year, we spent a whole month talking about the power of email marketing, but this important component of the marketing toolbox has just continued to evolve since then.
Is email marketing still as effective as it once was? It can be, but it’s harder to achieve meaningful results than ever before. Only the most strategic, savviest email marketers will succeed at generating leads and driving revenue via their email campaigns. Are you employing these strategies to make your email campaigns more effective?
Thoughtful timing
A marketing email can only make an impact if it reaches people when they are receptive to its messages. There is data (much of it conflicting) about the best time to send emails for different industries, but the specific times of day and days of the week your subscribers are most likely to open and engage with email messages is best determined through testing. Take a look at the open and click-through rates of your past email marketing campaigns, formulate a hypothesis about the timing that works best for specific types of messages, and then test it until you can determine what patterns work best for your business.
Engaging workflows
Don’t limit yourself to sending e-newsletters and other blasts to all your subscribers at once. Instead, segment your lists and tailor your messages so that you can deliver targeted content to specific groups of subscribers at ideal points in time. For example, your newly engaged prospects should not get the same messages as your leads that are close to closing, and your C-Suite decision-maker contacts should not get the same message as your product end user contacts.
But to truly compete, you should go beyond simple segmentation and move toward smart marketing automation. Create automated workflows that your prospects can trigger through specific actions on your website, engagement with your content or any other activity you deem important. Well-crafted email workflows can nurture your leads at a pace that is perfectly matched to their movement through your sales cycle without requiring much oversight from your marketing team.
Clickable subject lines
Your subscribers will never see your content, no matter how compelling it is, without clickable subject lines inviting them to open the email and engaging headlines encouraging them to read through to the end. Make sure your subject lines spark readers’ interest, and avoid language that may be flagged as spam. But don’t just guess. A/B test different subject lines and preview text for each message you send to see what draws the most interest.
Today more than ever, it’s crucial to keep subject lines concise. Most smartphone and mobile device email apps will truncate subject lines longer than 25-30 characters, and we suggest staying within that limit whenever possible, especially if a significant percentage of your subscribers open emails via mobile.
The inbox is becoming a fiercely competitive place, but optimizing these elements of your messages can help your company break through the clutter. Is email marketing still pulling its weight for your brand?
Photo Credit: adabara via Pixabay
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Is video the next great content channel for B2B? 76 percent of B2B marketers saying they will use video in their content marketing sometime this year. Video is shown to be as effective as blogging for B2B marketers, but given the costs associated with producing high-quality video content, companies need to strategically design video campaigns to deliver maximum impact.
If you are planning to add video to your B2B or healthcare marketing toolkit, take a look at these clips and consider what works and what flops before designing your next campaign.
In this video, Salesforce reminds us that humor and creativity isn’t just for B2C marketing. Here, Santa describes how he uses Salesforce to keep track of the Christmas wishes of 2.2 billion kids. It’s a clever way to tell the story of Salesforce’s marketing solutions, including the tool’s ability to build profiles to manage individual relationships, and provides a clear call-to-action back to salesforce.com.
VeriSign’s “Shopping Cart Whisperer,” created in 2008, is an early example of digital B2B video marketing done right. The campaign, which shows the character “Liberty Fillmore” comforting abandoned shopping carts and points to the domain www.NoMoreAbandonedCarts.com, was viral hit.
The Shopping Cart Whisperer was focused on how VeriSign could help businesses address the many online shoppers who abandon their virtual shopping carts because they don’t feel safe. The creators did many things right: the video is funny, highly resonant, and keeps the audience engaged until the end. However, this content is not evergreen.
While the video is still fun to watch, its lack of branding, while perhaps a strength originally, means that the video is no longer directing viewers to VeriSign. The www.NoMoreAbandonedCarts.com domain is not longer live, and VeriSign is not named anywhere in the video. Though the content lives on, it lacks a call-to-action that would allow VeriSign to continue to reap the benefits of their initial investment.
Jellyvision’s ALEX is a virtual guide who takes employees through an interactive program to help them better understand their benefits, company policies and other HR topics. The “Meet ALEX” demo video introduces the program and the virtual counselor to prospective users. The video clearly and concisely lays out the benefits of ALEX and demonstrates the usability of the tool.
Unlike the other two B2B videos discussed here, this one takes a straightforward (read: less humorous) approach, and is focused on communicating ALEX’s value propositions in a direct yet engaging way. For an innovative product like this one that is working to define a new category, this is a smart approach.
What can we learn from these B2B videos? All three provide engaging content that draws the viewer in, but Jellyvision and Salesforce succeed at maximizing the potential for ROI, while VeriSign falls short. If considering an unbranded campaign in the style of the “Shopping Cart Whisperer,” you must weigh the costs and benefits of presenting an unbranded video that viewers may or may not follow through to your campaign site.
Photo credit jsawkins via Flickr Creative Commons
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Especially in B2B marketing, social media exists in a strange place: its immediate impact on business isn’t always clear, yet it seems like something that should be done. But is it? Today, let’s take a look at how B2B brands can use social media to make a meaningful impact on the bottom line. It all starts with an understanding of what social can and cannot do.
Social media can’t directly drive revenue (at least not in a vacuum)…
Many B2C companies rely on social sales, but B2B purchases aren’t usually made because of a single Facebook post. Any B2B company that expects a standalone social media campaign to translate directly into sales will be disappointed.
Social media can be used to target potential clients, but to truly move those prospects through the sales funnel, social needs to be supported by other tactics like conversion optimized websites, content marketing and email nurturing. Social media should be thought of as one piece of a much larger marketing puzzle.
…But it can drive thought leadership
Social media can be an excellent tool for brands that want to build awareness among a highly targeted group of customers and strengthen their reputation through thought leadership.
Social media can help you share your expertise and ideas with the individuals who care about them most. Those ideas may spark conversations that can be used as jumping off points for lasting relationships that, if nurtured appropriately, can turn into sales. B2B marketing is all about relationships, and social media creates a venue for those relationships to germinate and grow.
To truly maximize social media’s thought leadership and relationship building potential, be sure you’re focused on the the channels that are best matched to your goals. LinkedIn is particularly well-suited to hosting long-form thought leadership pieces from your team members. Channels like Facebook and Twitter allow you to share links to your thought leadership pieces and other content, and your engaged followers can then discuss them with you share them more widely.
Any social strategy must work to strengthen other elements of an integrated marketing campaign, and be open to change as your marketing team reviews its performance. The best social media efforts are cross-channel optimized and developed based on data insights from past campaigns. Is your business following these best practices and launching social strategies with an understanding of what they can and cannot accomplish?
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What effect does the look and feel of your website have on visitors? Both the design and the copy on your site can meaningfully influence potential buyers, for better or worse. To maximize your lead generation efforts, your business needs to optimize every aspect of your website, front end and back.
For inspiration, take a look at these effective B2B sites:
Project management tool Basecamp’s website messaging is direct and clear. Copy and design elements are minimal, allowing the functionality of the product to shine. The site is branded through the use of its quirky illustration style and logo, incorporates calls to action throughout the home page, and packs in plenty of information without becoming cluttered. There’s a good deal of white space on each page, the text is large enough to read easily, and the calls-to-action are emphasized in the design.
Basecamp’s design shows that it’s possible to retain a quirky sense of humor in web design without compromising content and functionality. The site’s simple project management process is easy to follow, and the design compliments the user experience. As an added bonus, the mobile app is similarly optimized and retains the user-friendly functionality found on desktop.
Basecamp has one B2B product; GE has many. With products spanning industries as diverse as energy, healthcare and mining, GE’s website needs to display a lot of information in a clean, readable way. The GE B2B homepage is laid out with attractive tiles displaying a photo and brief text about each practice area. It’s easy to navigate, and the tiles expand into practice area-specific sites complete with detailed case studies.
Why is this site successful? While there is a wealth of information present, it is laid out and arranged in a fashion that doesn’t overwhelm the visitor. It also uses images and copy that tells a story, personalizing GE’s products and drawing the website visitor further into the content. GE for Business has refuted the notion that B2B marketing has to be boring; instead, the brand uses their website to humanize what they do.
When Movéo worked with Abbott Labs on the Labs Are Vital initiative, we created the Labs Are Vital website to showcase the importance of laboratories to the practice of evidence-based medicine. Our goal was to move the laboratory from “out of the basement and into the boardroom,” spotlighting the lab’s role in influencing healthcare decisionmaking. We reflected this not only in the slogan of the campaign, but also in the “vital” design of the website. Since the Labs Are Vital project is largely about building a community around laboratory medicine, events and social updates are prominently displayed. The site is optimized for mobile use, so it’s suited to reading news on the go.
There is no tried and true formula for optimizing the design and content of your site because every audience has unique needs and every business has a unique set of goals. These high-performing sites will give you inspiration, but to truly maximize your site’s performance, you should A/B test everything you can and keep an eye on analytics so you can maximize what works and eliminate what doesn’t.
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Your team has devoted plenty of resources to creating website copy and downloadable content — isn’t it time you made your content marketing work harder for you? These couple of steps might be all you need to take your digital content to the next level:
Optimize for search and for readers
When content is both well-written and optimized for search, it can drive organic traffic to your site. It’s essential to create a keyword list and refer to it when developing content if you want to rank for competitive keywords in your industry. Pick about a dozen focused keywords that have sufficient search volume, but aren’t so competitive that you’ll never make it to the first page of search results. Practice incorporating these keywords into your writing in ways that feel natural. Learn best practices for both the technical and content components of SEO optimization, and be sure to stay informed of major updates to search engine algorithms and adapt accordingly.
Connect your content
Always incorporate a strong call-to-action (CTA) into your content. For blog posts and infographics, this CTA may drive readers to more in-depth downloadable content such as a white paper, encouraging them down the inbound marketing funnel and giving them the information they need to ultimately decide to buy. CTAs may also encourage site visitors to join an email marketing list or to directly contact a representative of your company.
Once you integrate CTAs throughout your marketing collateral, keep an eye on your site’s analytics to see the paths visitors take to and through your content. Are some CTAs more impactful than others? If so, use them as replacements for other, less effective calls-to-action and see if you can improve click-through rates.
Analyze your audience
Great website content adds value for your audience, and it can add value for your team (and your sales) as well. Put content behind a form that requires visitors to input their information before they access the download. Give your audience the opportunity to indicate their interest level and make a connection with your business by filling in their contact information. Allow visitors to include what they are interested in and, if you have more than one set of email lists, opt out of those lists that are not relevant to them. Not only does this allow your audience more control over how their information is used, it also allows you to target your messages more effectively and reach the right people with the right content at the right time.
Digital content takes time to develop, distribute and optimize, but if you follow a few of these best practices, the investment can be well worth it.
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Thanks to the advent of new technologies, marketers have more channels available than ever before through which to reach their targets and grow their bottom lines. Today, a sophisticated campaign may include the traditional advertising we’re used to from years past, while also utilizing social media platforms, engaging video content and highly-targeted email nurturing, as well as a handful of other tactics.
While this opens up new opportunities to reach customers, marketers also need to be sure they’re taking ample time to optimize their content across an increasingly complex mix of marketing channels. When planning a cross-channel campaign, your marketing team must take into account the strengths and weaknesses inherent to each channel and tailor content accordingly.
If you want your cross-channel marketing efforts to be successful, avoid these three common mistakes:
1) Keeping the same expectations and goals across channels
Different channels deliver different outcomes: while a media relations campaign can build brand awareness and affinity, it will not necessarily deliver direct sales. If it’s a direct impact on your bottom line you’re looking for, a lead gen campaign may be more effective.
Learn to recognize what to expect from the tactics you’re utilizing, and set measurable goals that reflect the strengths and weaknesses of each channel.
2) Overemphasizing one channel without the data to back it up
Your customers consume a wide variety of media, and you should build your campaigns accordingly. Unless you have data indicating that your target market is active on one specific channel, avoid putting too many of your eggs in one basket. Instead, diversify your campaigns by distributing your content across a wide variety of channels and test the effectiveness of each one.
3) Using content across channels without tailoring
As we’ve discussed before, a cross-channel campaign needs to be unified, but content must be tailored to fit the strengths of each channel. Your white papers, for instance, should not be presented in the same format on your website as they are in your email campaigns. Major brands have been taking their cross-channel optimization to new levels, and you need to as well if you want to compete.
Take, for example, Samsung’s “Ready for the Next Big Thing” enterprise marketing campaign. Samsung has not historically devoted a significant portion of its marketing budget to its corporate customer segment, but the company wanted to make a major push into the enterprise space in 2015. Recognizing that their business customers are just as sophisticated in their media consumption habits as consumer targets, Samsung developed a highly diversified, cross-channel optimized approach for “Ready for the Next Big Thing.”
The campaign includes print and digital advertising in both major publications like Bloomberg and The New York Times and niche tech websites, but also takes advantage of video and social media. While print ads deliver brief, straightforward messages focused on the impact of Samsung’s phones on employee productivity, digital video content goes in-depth into business-friendly features of the Samsung Galaxy S6 such as multi-tasking (“check your calendar while you send a text”) and access to Office 360 apps, and shows them in action. The messaging is consistent, but uniquely tailored to the opportunities presented by each channel.
Are you guilty of any of these mistakes in your campaigns? What will you do to improve?
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At Movéo, we don’t just preach cross-channel content optimization and campaign integration, we practice it. When we partnered with Landis+Gyr to create the Future.Ready. campaign, high-quality, channel-optimized content was at the center of our efforts.
Landis+Gyr: A Leader in Smart Grid Technology
A part of the Toshiba Group of companies, Landis+Gyr provides products that help utilities manage energy. They are a global leader in utility metering solutions, but they were having difficulty breaking into North American markets. They turned to Movéo to help them raise their profile in the U.S. and position them as the clear leader in smart grid technology.
Strategy
We began by building a unifying, impactful value proposition to demonstrate Landis+Gyr’s leadership in the industry. After testing four options in a national study, one clear winner emerged: a statement about Landis+Gyr’s flexible, tailored solutions that work today and will work tomorrow was determined to best convey the value of the Landis+Gyr brand. Once we had that message in place, we set out to build a cross-channel campaign to bring it to life.
We knew highly engaging content would be at the center of our strategy, and that choosing the appropriate channels and optimizing our content to each of them would determine our success. Here are a few of the channels we chose:
Video
We developed a video explaining the importance of smart grid technologies for the Landis+Gyr website, YouTube channel and for email campaigns. In the video, we showcased short interviews with Landis+Gyr executives explaining the need for better metering technologies, and paired these with video clips illustrating how the technologies could be used in real life. Whether viewed via YouTube, email or the Landis+Gyr website, the videos offered an educational introduction to the smart grid for customers unfamiliar with the technology.
Digital and print magazine
The campaign video provided a brief glimpse into the importance of smart grid technologies, but we knew that target customers needed more in-depth content to truly understand this highly technical topic and move into the next phase of the sales funnel. With that in mind, we developed Future.Ready., a Landis+Gyr-branded magazine, to take a deeper dive into all things smart grid. Available in both an e-zine and paper format and targeted at Landis+Gyr’s ideal buyer, Future.Ready. continued to promote Landis+Gyr’s state-of-the-art technology. It also furthered the company’s thought leadership while addressing the questions and concerns of industry leaders through articles such as “Preventing Cyberattacks: Can Utilities Hack It?” The magazine component of the campaign allowed us to reach buyers who were further along in the decision-making process and ready for more in-depth educational content.
Responsive website
In order to create a home for the Future.Ready. campaign and maximize Landis+Gyr’s digital presence for different browsers and devices, we created a responsive website. The Future.Ready. microsite was designed as a visually appealing and easy-to-navigate home for all of the campaign assets. Regardless of whether they were visiting the site from a mobile device, tablet or computer, visitors could find information tailored to their needs, including white papers, case studies and more videos.
Cross-channel content, working together
By building a campaign around an impactful, tested value proposition and ensuring that all content we created was optimized for the channel through which it was delivered, we were able to establish Landis+Gyr as a trusted brand in the energy management industry. The latest metrics from a brand study show that Landis+Gyr is now the clear category leader, with a 56% mindshare. Landis+Gyr earned a boost over its competitors as a result of the campaign, and is now the preferred supplier of AMI and smart grid solutions. At the same time, consumers now most strongly associate Landis+Gyr with the “future-proof” positioning we developed.
To learn more about Movéo’s work with Landis+Gyr and the resulting outcomes, take a look at our case study.
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Good content, even content that engages and excites readers, doesn’t always result in new leads. There’s one trait that separates the ineffective content from the effective, and unfortunately, much of the content B2B and healthcare companies produce is missing this “secret sauce.”
Effective content spurs audiences into action. It’s really as simple as that. If you can accurately identify your target customer’s problem, demonstrate your ability to solve it, and then show them exactly how to take action, your content will generate new leads. But to create this kind of effective content, you first need to determine what your customers value and how to demonstrate your ability to provide it.
Determine What Your Customers Need and Value
Thanks to the increasing availability to data and business intelligence, it’s easier to understand customer needs today than ever before. Your website analytics and sales data are excellent places to start. Social media also presents unique opportunities to gain customer intelligence in real-time. Companies that want to gain a deeper understanding of their customer needs and pain points should go a step further and utilize quantitative tools like customer surveys, as well as qualitative tools like stakeholder interviews.
Demonstrate Your Expertise
Once you have a solid understanding of your customers’ marketing needs, values, challenges and pain points, it is time to demonstrate your ability to address them.
Strong case studies are an effective tool for demonstrating expertise because they provide concrete examples of how businesses address and resolve customer problems. Well-crafted case studies make clear your company’s involvement in a client’s success without making it all about you. But you should get creative and think beyond the case study as well. Video content, microsites and whitepapers can all be effective vehicles for delivering messages about your ability to solve key customer problems. Just be sure to focus on concrete, real world examples no matter the channel you choose.
Show Your Target Customers How to Take Action
Every piece of content you create must have an end goal. Do you want your audience to subscribe to your newsletter, call your sales team, or make a direct purchase? Whatever your call-to-action may be, it’s crucial to make it singular and painfully clear. Throughout your content, and especially at its conclusion, show your audience the action you want them to take and include a link or button that allows them to act immediately.
Next week, we’ll provide more insights on how to make cross-channel content work for your business. In the meantime, review your content marketing strategy. Is your content as effective as it could be? Is it moving your ideal customers to take action?
Photo credit: John Benson via Flickr Creative Commons, cropped
