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With Halloween just around the corner, we thought it would be a good time to share a few of the many marketing “tricks” that we use on a nearly daily basis to help our clients achieve their goals. After 25 years in business, we’ve learned a thing or two about maximizing ROI, building brands and growing bottom lines. Here are some of the best tricks we’ve developed over the years:
Find your brand “hill.” Good branding is essential for B2B companies, but it takes much more than a clever name and a powerful logo to build a brand. If you want your brand to be truly successful, you need identify the unique position that your company (and no one else) owns in the marketplace. We call this position your “hill” because, much like troops capturing ground in battle, the hill is “mental ground” that must be occupied and defended in the minds of your audience.
Make content the centerpiece of your brand. Thankfully, B2B marketing is more about what you know than who you know, and the best way to display your knowledge is through high quality informational content, like videos, white papers, podcasts and blogs. That’s why we think content marketing should be at the center of your brand-building efforts. After your brand strategy is completed and socialized within your organization, begin developing a content marketing plan that will help you own and defend it.
Integrate. A strong brand and quality content are essential, but they’re much more effective when integrated with a variety of other marketing techniques. As you build your brand and craft your content strategy, be on constant lookout for new ways to spread your message. The best branding campaigns and content marketing plans are supported by an optimal mix of other marketing tactics, like paid media advertising, organic search optimization, media relations, demand generation, email marketing and social media.
What are some of your favorite B2B marketing tricks?
Featured image via: Trumpia
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We’re taking another trip back through our archives today to revisit a great post from Irene Westcott on the true measure of an “integrated” agency. We thought this post was worth another look due to the fact that we’ve seen even greater convergence in media channels since this post was written, making integration more important than ever before. Do you think many agencies are truly practicing the type of integration that Irene describes in her post?
In a recent Adweek article, Bob Greenberg held forth on the ideal agency structure for the electronic age. Not surprisingly, the model he favors is the same one adopted by his own firm, R/GA. Their “integrated structure,” he writes, “combines nine departmental disciplines: planning, analytics, media, interaction design, visual design, copywriting, technology, account management and production…” By organizing his employees around skill sets — rather than client or accounts — Greenberg claims to have eliminated “siloed” thinking — the kind of “but-we’ve-always-done-it-this-way” mentality that trips up many agencies.
This issue I take with Greenberg’s article is not with his proposed agency structure — in fact, it closely mirrors the one we use here at Movéo. No, what bothers me is the notion that this integrated structure is a kind of panacea.
True integration — that is, getting individuals to work as a seamless whole — takes interaction. And interaction is a function of people, not org charts or management models. Interaction takes commitment and effort. It takes getting up from behind your desk and going out of your way to share ideas and information. And no agency structure — no matter how brilliantly conceived — can make that happen. Only hard working people can.
And now, at the risk of sounding like Bob Greenberg, I’m going to toot my own horn. One of the things that makes Movéo successful is a commitment to working together. To making sure that everyone has the information they need. And to encouraging great ideas, no matter what quarter they come from. Like agency structure, hard work isn’t a foolproof approach to integration. But, it’s still the best I’ve seen.
– Irene Westcott, Creative Director
Featured image via: Real Integrated
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As you know, we don’t often recommend external downloads here on Get There, but this piece is simply too good to keep to ourselves. Two weeks ago, Marketing Profs and TopRank released an e-book called, “Not Your Father’s B2B,” that promises to “help you escape the dullsville of old fashioned B2B marketing,” and “bring some modern innovation to the classic world of business to business marketing.” It certainly lives up to its promise.
The e-book centers around a list of 33 ways to innovate in B2B marketing, and each tip is expanded upon by a different B2B marketing expert. Contributors include industry thought leaders like Joe Pulizzi, Paul Gillin and Joe Yeager. We learned a thing or two ourselves from this e-book, and we’re sure you will, too.
Some of our favorite tips from the e-book include:
9. Borrow freely. Roberta Rosenberg encourages B2B marketers not to get sucked into the mindset that B2B is less creative than B2C, and to borrow from our B2C counterparts to create something truly resonant.
11. Buyers are people, too. Amanda Maksymiw reminds B2B marketers that their customers don’t become different people as soon as they arrive to the office. She says there is no need to treat B2B buyers as a different species from regular consumes, and we couldn’t agree more.
26. Tell stories. Cisco’s Tom Washer provides an example of the power of stories and encourages B2B marketers to find and tell the stories of their best customers for maximum impact.
Want more? You can download the entire e-book here.
Featured image via: Top Rank
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To gate or not to gate? It’s a common debate among B2B content marketers, and unfortunately, there is no simple answer. Gating content — requiring prospects to fill out a form before they can download your white paper, video or other thought leadership piece — is commonplace in the B2B world. But, just because it’s common doesn’t mean it’s effective.
If you’re trying to decide whether to create a content gate, it really comes down to your goals. At its most basic level, thought leadership can achieve one or both of the following objectives:
- Positioning
- Lead generation
Before you gate a piece of content, think long and hard about which of these goal is more important to you. If your priority is simply to establish your company as a leader in your field, gated content is likely to be ineffective. Sure, it’s nice to get a list of leads that have already taken some interest in your company and have experienced your thought leadership firsthand. But how many prospects will you turn away in the process?
Unless you can convince your prospect that your piece of content will truly revolutionize the way they work, the chances that they will give away their personal information for a download are slim. Huge drop-offs in download numbers are observed nearly ever time a piece of content goes from un-gated to gated. Even if a prospect does decide to fill out your form, there is no guarantee they will provide accurate information. Have you ever had a Mickey Mouse subscribe to your house list?
If positioning is your true goal, gating your content can be counterproductive. Instead of slapping a form on everything you create, work on building up your reputation so that prospects will gladly hand over their information (when they’re ready) in order to receive more valuable content from you.
Of course, if lead generation is really more important to you than positioning, a piece of gated content here or there might make sense. Just be sure that the content you gate is truly one of the juiciest, most valuable pieces your target will ever come across.
Featured image via: Business Growth Agency
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In honor of our 25th anniversary, we’re going to pull some of our old favorite guest posts out of the archive and take a fresh look at them this month. Our field is evolving more quickly than most, but there are some things (like creativity, transparency and resonance) that will never die. We hope you’ll enjoy our look back at these posts throughout the month. Have another favorite you’d like to see featured? Let us know in the comments!
Today’s archive post comes from Angela Costanzi, our Vice President of Creative Services. We’ve chosen to feature it because it seems that, as marketing evolves, “dual brain” thinkers like Angela are in more demand than ever. It seems that the days of the right-brained creative being brought down to reality by the left-brained account manager are long gone. In today’s integrated and fluid media environment, creatives need to be analytical and more rational thinkers also need to be capable of abstract thinking. Here’s what Angela had to say about her creative brain a few years ago:
Most people would agree that creative, pie-in-the-sky types are
right-brained individuals, while left-brainers make fantastic
number-crunchers. I’ve always been on board with that, too. In a somewhat
pensive state I put two and two together and realized that a person with a
dominant right brain is actually left-handed. I had never questioned my
right-handed status until now. For all practical purposes I should be using
my left hand…after all, I’m a CREATIVE Director, not an accountant.
The right brain is intuitive, holistic, subjective, random (a person capable
of dreaming up some really outlandish stuff). “My side” is logical,
sequential, rational and probably spends a great deal of time over analyzing
things (guilty). In thinking it over, I’ve settled on this; the right brain
doesn’t work alone to generate creative.
After looking into some scientific studies, it turns out that I’ve actually
been putting the right side of my brain through strength training for a
number of years. The creative process itself (holding attention span,
visualizing spaces, exploring color, etc) is like high-impact aerobics for
the brain’s right hemisphere. So I get the best of both worlds–my whole
brain.
I’m a right-handed Creative Director! I’m time-conscious, budget-conscious
and rarely unconscious because my left-brain positive emotions dominate. I
over-analyze to be sure that a good idea truly is a good idea and because
I’m so rational, I can usually determine the most efficient ways to get
things done. And because I’ve worked the right side hard, it rewards me time
to time with some wild ideas.
Featured image via: David Lightfoot
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Social media is all about making connections, so it seems obvious that we should put a great deal of effort into interacting and forming relationships with others online. Despite this fact, it seems that many B2B community managers are much more focused on broadcasting information about their companies and products than on interacting with others. As a result, opportunities for engagement and relationship building are missed every day. The reason, we believe, is that many simply don’t know who to interact with.
That’s why we’ve created this quick primer on finding key influencers in social media. Follow these steps, and you’ll never have to wonder who to interact with again.
- Run a search on TweetLevel. If you spend a lot of time on Twitter, this tool is the best way to identify key influencers in your field. Simply plug in keywords related to your area of expertise (ex: green energy or mobile computing technology) and TweetLevel will spit out a list of top influencers. TweetLevel’s algorithm is based not just on activity, but also on number of followers and retweets, so you can be sure you’ll find users who have something valuable to say.
- Run a Google Blog Search. Many thought leaders are also bloggers, so the blogosphere can be a great place to look for key influencers in your field. Simply search for terms related to your area of expertise and then take note of the most active, insightful and well-followed bloggers. If you want to check how popular they really are, use Alexa’s page rank tool for an estimation of their daily page views and visits. Most bloggers link to their social channels on their homepages, so it won’t be difficult to locate them in social media.
- See who your top customers and competitors follow. On most social networks, it’s easy to figure out who your connections interact with. Names that show up on the friend or follow list of a large number of your customers or competitors are likely to be key influencers in your field.
- Set up an influencer monitoring system. After you’ve identified key influencers using steps 1-3, it’s time to set up a system for keeping track of what they’re saying. We like to organize key influencers into a stream on Hootsuite so that all of their tweets show up in one place. We also have a Google Reader folder just for key influencer blogs. A quick glance through this folder helps us stay up-to-date on the hottest topics in our industry. On Facebook, we simply “like” key influencers and keep up with them through our news feed.
- Watch for new influencers. Social media is constantly evolving, and today’s newbies might be tomorrow’s key influencers. To monitor for new voices, we suggest setting up a Hootsuite feed that captures all tweets using a certain word or phrase that relates to your industry. It’s also a good idea to set up a Google Reader folder that pulls articles using key industry phrases. If you start seeing new names pop up repeatedly in your steams, you might have a new influencer on your hands.
- Interact. What good is all of this influencer information we don’t leverage it to form relationships? Once you’ve identified key influencers, get out there and start a conversation. Answering and asking questions, sharing content, or simply saying “thanks” for a piece of content you found particularly useful can be a great way to start.
What other ways do you identify influencers online?
Featured image via: Hear Our Voices
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October is always a celebratory time here at Movéo because it marks the anniversary of the launch of our agency. However, this October is more exciting than most because Movéo is turning 25! A huge “thanks!” goes out to all those who have made our first 25 years a success. Our clients, partners, employees, families and friends have made this journey worthwhile, and we can’t wait to share the next chapter with all of you. In true Movéo fashion, we’ll be celebrating with a party later this month. We’ve decided to take the celebration online as well, and for the next 25 weekdays, we plan to share our top 25 Movéo memories on Facebook and Twitter. Have your own Movéo memory you want to share? Add it to our list by using the hashtag #moveoturns25. Here’s to another 25 years!
Featured image via: Tribe
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Another month (and season) has come to an end, and it’s once again time for a list of our favorite recent B2B marketing posts from around the blogosphere. Enjoy!
Content Marketing 101: 8 steps to B2B Success via SherpaBlog
It’s easy to get bogged down in the complexities of starting a content marketing program, so we were happy to see this post, which breaks the process down into a set of eight easy-to-follow steps. Now you’ll have to lose those excuses and get your content program up and running!
Buyer Personas in B2B Marketing via B2B Digital
This is a great overview of the buyer personas for those who are less familiar with the concept (which, according to this post, is a lot of you). Filp through the SlideShare highlights from the recent #B2BChat to get a well-rounded perspective on the use of personas across our industry.
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Last week, Twitter followed LinkedIn’s example from earlier this month and rolled out a new format for its profile pages that is better tailored to the needs of brands and businesses. It seems that all the major social networks have now realized that brands require different types of pages than individuals. Here are a few ways to take advantage of the changes:
- Upload a larger profile photo. The default size for the profile photo is now 73px x 73px. This larger size will allow you to display a higher quality version of your logo.
- Create a profile header. Just like Facebook and LinkedIn, the new Twitter brand pages include a large header photo that can be a great branding tool for your page. Image maps and animation are prohibited, but use of text and messaging is not restricted as it is on Facebook.
- Improve your background. Twitter has long allowed users to create custom backgrounds, but until now, it has been extremely difficult to control their appearance and to keep the Twitter feed from unintentionally covering key images or text. New controls for alignment fix this problem.
- Pin key tweets. Perhaps the best feature of Twitter’s new business pages is the ability to pin important tweets to the top of your timeline. Consider using this feature any time you make an important announcement or run a special promotion.
Have you played around with the new Twitter business page settings yet? We plan to upgrade our own page later this week and will let you know how it goes when we do.
Featured image via StarGroup
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As we mentioned a few weeks ago, B2B marketers can learn a great deal from Apple’s successful product launch strategy. However, last week, it became clear that we can learn just as much from the Silicon Valley giant’s mistakes.
Along with the release of the iPhone 5, Apple also made their most advanced iPhone operating system, iOS6, available to all iPhone users last Thursday. The new operating system has a lot of great features, but it also includes one major flop: Apple Maps. Immediately after iOS6, became available, iPhone users took to the Internet to complain about how poor the new maps application is. In addition to leaving out entire cities and important landmarks and failing to include a transit directions feature, the new Apple map also generates images that look like this:
It’s no wonder iPhone users are disappointed. However, it’s not the flawed application, but rather Apple’s response to the public opinion surrounding it, that we want to highlight as a cautionary tale for any B2B marketer who is planning a major product launch.
After public outcry became hard to ignore, Apple’s PR team Launched the following statement (according to Mashable): “We launched this new map service knowing it is a major initiative and that we are just getting started with it. Maps is a cloud-based solution and the more people use it, the better it will get. We appreciate all of the customer feedback and are working hard to make the customer experience even better.”
There are a few problems here. First, Apple is admitting to launching a product that is below the company’s high standards. Apple has long been known for the high attention to detail and perfectionism that goes into the development of each of its products. This misstep has the potential to seriously tarnish the brand’s reputation.
Second, and most importantly, Apple is asking its customers to wait around while they improve their subpar product, while giving them no alternatives to use until improvements are made. It’s rumored that Google Maps has released a version of their popular mapping application (the one that appeared on all past iOS iterations) but that Apple has so far blocked the Google app from hitting their App Store. This could be enough to drive heavy map users away from Apple and toward Android. We know Google and Apple are highly competitive, but it doesn’t seem logical to risk losing device users over a single app.
Next time you’re preparing for a product launch, keep this cautionary tale in mind. If your brand is known for perfection, don’t release a new product and until it’s been fully vetted and approved by your customers. If you do release a product with problems, make sure you give your customers the option of using an older iteration until you work out the kinks.
