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Here’s a new term for your B2B marketing jargon dictionary: magnetic content. If you haven’t heard it already, you will. Marketers in both the B2B and the B2C spaces have been using the term to describe any kind of content “that attracts rather than distracts.” If you’re still confused, don’t worry. We’re here to break down the buzzword.
In our opinion, magnetic content meets the following criteria:
- It doesn’t interrupt. If people seek out your content on their own accord, it might be magnetic. If they come into contact with it through an interruption (think pop-up ads), it’s definitely not magnetic.
- It provides something useful. If your content provides information on how to save money, be more successful at work, or solve a problem, it might be magnetic. If the sole message in your content focuses on sales, it’s definitely not magnetic
- It encourages sharing and engagement. If people feel that your content is just so good that they need to forward it to a friend or interact with others who are digesting it, it might be magnetic. If they’d never consider sharing your content, it’s definitely not magnetic.
Jargon though it may be, we think “magnetic content” is a great way to describe content that really works. Will you be adding this term to your lexicon?
Featured image via https://itsyourcall.com/
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No matter how you go about it, generating a qualified B2B lead is never cheap. But if you believe the statistics, inbound leads come at a much more reasonable cost than outbound. In fact, as our strategic agency partner in the UK, Earnest, highlighted in their “vital statistics” video, the average outbound lead costs $364 to obtain, while the average inbound lead costs only $135.
But why? Surely inbound marketing tactics and assets (white papers, landing pages etc.) can’t be that much more affordable to execute than outbound (direct mail, advertising etc.)
We believe the real reason behind the relative affordability of an inbound lead is the fact that the customer is closer to making a purchase decision when they come to you through inbound marketing. Unlike outbound marketing, which begins with the introduction of a product and concludes with an attempt to convince the buyer they need it, inbound marketing begins with the buyer’s need. Inbound marketing takes place when a buyer recognizes the need for a certain type of product or service, and then begins to research options. It concludes when that buyer comes to you ready (or nearly ready) to buy and makes it easy for you to close the sale.
This is where we believe the significant cost saving occurs. Because the buyer has already worked through much of her decision making process at her own pace before she comes to you, you won’t have to spend much time courting her or convincing her to buy as you might with an outbound lead. Time is money, and the less time you spend on each new prospective customer before they make a purchase, the more money you save.
Have you experienced cost savings with inbound marketing like we’ve described above? Let us know in the comments.
Featured image via onlinemaske.com.
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As BtoB Magazine reported earlier today, Facebook has officially launched a new ad retargeting tool that allows advertisers to bid real-time for Facebook ads that target users based on their browsing activity across the web. This new option presents some great opportunities for advertisers, but before you run off and start bidding on ads, there are a few things you should know:
1. There are creative constraints on retargeted Facebook ads. Just like any other Facebook unit, your retargeted ad will need to comply with Facebook’s standard size and format regulations. Unfortunately, this will make it difficult to maintain consistency between ads on Facebook and those elsewhere on the web.
2. Facebook targeting parameters cannot be used on top of retargeting parameters. This means you can set up parameters for the type of web browsing activity you want to target, but you can’t further filter users via Facebook’s internal parameters like age, interests, or locaiton.
3. Retargeting is limited to marketplace ads and desktop browsing only. Perhaps the biggest limitation with Facebook’s new retargeting option is the fact that it can only be used with marketplace ads. Despite being one of the most common Facebook ad formats, marketplace ads don’t show up on mobile device. This means you might want to hold off on running a Facebook retargeting campaign if you target an audience that is active on mobile devices.
Facebook’s new retargeted ads certainly have some limitations, but they also present great opportunities to reach your target on a site where they spend a great deal of time. Be sure to let us know what you think of the new ad format if you decide to give it a try.
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You’ve undoubtedly heard by now that Apple unveiled its new iPhone 5 today. In true Apple fashion, the product launch was surrounded by a great deal of anticipation, speculation and fanfare. Whether you think the new iPhone 5 is truly innovative or just a glorified version of the iPhone 4, there’s no denying the fact that Apple has truly mastered the art of a successful product launch.
Sure, most companies can’t even dream of having the kind of fame, exposure or loyal following that Apple enjoys, but anyone can learn a thing or two from Apple’s product launch strategy. Here are a few things you can learn from Apple to make your next launch a success.
1. Build your brand first. Apple’s product launches are successful first and foremost because the company has a huge number of brand loyalists, advocates and devotees. Before you start thinking about executing a blockbuster launch, you must focus on making your brand as strong as it can possibly be. Take a page out of Apple’s book and build your brand around a belief. Then, make sure that belief is executed through everything you do, and work to form real, emotional relationships with your customers. Make your brand a lifestyle.
2. Create buzz. Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Apple’s brand launches is their ability to generate an immense amount of buzz. Despite the fact that we often have very little idea what Apple is about to unveil, the mere fact that they’ve scheduled an event is enough to get the media talking. You might have to work a bit harder to get the media’s attention, but crafting a media relations strategy surrounding your product launch, and focusing most heavily on the weeks leading up to your launch date, can make a huge difference.
3. Back it up. This is one area where we can learn from Apple’s mistakes. Many Apple aficionados were underwhelmed with the iPhone 5. After all the publicity and expectations surrounding the launch, some felt that the new model didn’t live up to expectations. Don’t let this happen to your company. If you go through the effort of executing a blockbuster launch, make sure your product can actually live up to the buzz you generate.
4. Rally your troops. Apple doesn’t just hold press events. Their product launches are more like pep rallies. Follow their example and invite not just the press, but also your most devoted customers and biggest fans to a launch event. Their excitement will be infectious, and you can bet the media will take note.
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As you may already know, LinkedIn rolled out a new look and feel for its company pages to select big name users last week. The new design, which looks more than a little bit like Facebook’s timeline, will be available for all company pages later this year.
Unless you work for Philips, Citi, HP or Dell, you can’t take advantage of the new design just yet, but you can certainly prepare for the impending rollout so that you’re ready to go when the new pages become available to your company. Here are a few ways to do just that:
- Choose a highlighted photo. Much like the new Facebook timeline, the new LinkedIn company pages have one large, horizontal photo front and center. Choose a photo that will look good in a horiztonal layout and that clearly communicates the essence of your brand or company culture. Highlighted photos appear to be 640 pixels high x 220 pixels wide.
- Create product and service descriptions. If you haven’t developed product and service descriptions for LinkedIn yet, now is the time. Thought products and services do appear on the current company pages, they’ll be much more prominent in the new page setup. Make sure to include an image for each product or service to achieve maximum impact.
- Build LinkedIn updates into your content calendar. Many LinkedIn users have been hesitant to post frequent status updates on the network because they don’t want to bombard their professional connections with too much content. LinkedIn’s new company pages will make it easy to share content only with the specific groups you want to reach, allowing you to share relevant information only with the people you feel will want to see it most. With these new capabilities, there is no reason to refrain from sharing on LinkedIn. Start thinking about the specific groups you want to share with and drafting potential status updates that will be of interest to them.
How are you preparing for the new LinkedIn company pages? Tell us in the comments.
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Last week, we devoured Kipp Bodnar’s podcast on social media strategy for B2B companies. We cheered when he warned against making assumptions about what will work with social media, and we took tons of notes when he offered advice about new ways to use social tools for lead generation. But there was one part of the podcast where we wanted to interrupt Kip and add our two cents. When discussing barriers to blogging in the B2B world, Kip said that the reason most B2B companies don’t blog is because “it’s so freaking hard.” While it’s true that blogging is tough, we think there is an even bigger barrier that keeps B2B companies from blogging. Most B2B companies don’t know what to blog about.
We truly believe that half the battle in B2B blogging is choosing a topical niche for your content. Many B2B marketers believe that, because of the nature of their product or service, they have nothing to blog about that their audience will find worth reading on a regular basis. The truth is, even if you have an interesting product or service, no one is going to want to read about it week in and week out. To truly be successful at B2B blogging, you need to think bigger than your company when choosing a topic for your blog. You need to think about the interests of your target market, and then find a unique way to add your voice to the discussion around those interests.
Let’s look at a few theoretical examples. Let’s say Company X provides manufacturers with recycling and waste disposal solutions. If you think their customers will add a blog about garbage to their daily reads list, you’re sorely mistaken. However, there’s a good chance that Company X’s target market is deeply interested in issues related to corporate environmental stewardship and sustainability. Knowing this, Company X could choose to start a blog about sustainability in the manufacturing industry, a topic with much broader appeal and a much larger variety of possible post topics. Company X could blog about everything from energy efficiency to facilities management, and they could tie in their expertise on recycling and waste management once in a while, as well. Doing so would position them as a thought leader in the industry, and would attract companies who want to work with a waste management partner that “gets” sustainability.
Here’s another. Let’s say Company Z offers a cloud computing platform for inside sales teams. Their target market probably won’t want to read post after post about the functionality of Company Z’s platform. Posts about new features might be interesting at first, but they won’t keep readers coming back. What Company Z’s target is really interested in is improving the efficiency of its sales team through technology and making more sales. Knowing this, Company Z could decide to blog about the intersection of digital technology and sales, and could write about everything from social CRM to techniques for closing sales through email. Of course, posts about Company Z’s product could come into the mix, but they wouldn’t be the focus of the blog. This strategy would position Company Z’s product as an essential piece to the sales puzzle for the tech-savvy customers in their target market.
Next time you feel compelled to claim your company isn’t blogging because you don’t have anything to blog about, try thinking about the topics that your target customer is interested in and considering how you could add your voice to the discussion. Choosing a topic for your B2B blog is really as simple as that.
Featured image via White Book Agency.
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Since we spent last week wrapping up our “Burning Questions” series, we decided to share our favorite B2B marketing posts from August this week rather than at the end of the month as usual. There were so many great articles, posts, webinars, and podcasts last month that it was difficult to narrow our list down to just a few faves. That means you can rest assured that the links we’ve included here are truly worth a visit. Share your favorites that didn’t make the list in the comments!
Financial Comparison of B2B Marketing Automation Vendors by David Raab
Choosing a marketing automation partner can sometimes feel like a gamble, but this “Raab Report” post will help you remove the guesswork. Though it’s a little data-dense, Raab’s post reveals important information on the efficiency, productivity and client-per-employee ratios of today’s most popular marketing automation solutions that B2B companies should pay attention to before making any big decisions.
Taking on B2B Marketing Buzzword: Conversation via Marketing Interactions
Our industry is guiltier than most of overusing trendy buzzwords. Think “engagement,” “relevance” and “relationships.” Marketing Interactions tackles all these and then some in a recent series that aims to give meaning to the many buzzwords that get thrown around in B2B marketing. We found the discussion on conversation (especially on the contrast between a conversation and a dialogue) to be particularly insightful.
The New B2B Buyer | 6 Rules of Engagement eBook! via B2B Marketing Strategy
We all know that the B2B buyer is changing, and now we finally have a resource that will help us adapt. Learn how to reach a buyer that is “more connected, more impatient, more elusive, more impulsive, and more informed than its pre-millennium ancestors,” with this excellent e-book.
Featured image via DCist.
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Today, we’re going to wrap up our discussion on content strategy with an examination of a controversial topic: content delivery. There is a lot of debate going on right now in the B2B world about the merits of “gating” content, or putting it behind a form or paywall. The content experts at Movéo and Earnest have their own thoughts on the matter that they’ll share in today’s final post in our content strategy series. If you haven’t already, catch up on all the other posts here.
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PH
How do you make your content as available as possible to the audience? We have large discussions around “gated” content and the needs of content developers to use data capture forms because that allows the sales force to get intelligence. However, organizations now just have to let go of their content, let it get out there. If they’ve got the right marketing automation platforms in place they can do the tracking on the back of those and start to nurture those opportunities, but don’t ask for lots and lots of data to simply get a white paper or guide.
BD
You see too much drop off when you put those demands on people. You can get that information by providing valued content and they will want to subscribe, they will want to register for future content and gladly provide that information if you’re providing valued content. But on a per-piece basis, like you’re saying, nobody is going to want to do that; nobody wants to write down all his or her vitals just to get a white paper.
DS
That’s a really important point because companies see the opportunity to collect information from somebody who’s expressed…who’s raised their hand for instance. So you wind up with what are effectively gates. The company doesn’t think of it as a gate. They think of it as, “I’m going to get all this great information!” What the user experiences is a gate — a locked door. Speaking from personal experience, I’m a huge fan of white papers and downloading things and so forth and so on. If I’m looking at filling out six or eight fields of information, I don’t. I don’t do it. I’ll give you an email perhaps, but it wants my title, it wants the size of my organization and all these sorts of things, frequently I’ll say “no.”
CW
I will take it one step further than that. I totally agree, but I think there is an even bigger risk that no one is measuring at the moment. It is the even worse scenario of someone who does give all his or her details for that content but just isn’t ready to buy. Why that’s such a big problem is a lot of sales efforts and resources will be spent trying to get a meeting with that person who might be six months away, or the wrong person and you need a very different type of engagement. By “un-gating” a lot of things…it goes back to aligning to the buying cycle of organizations, and therefore, sales efforts can be far more directive. That’s a very blunt view of what a profiled lead is at the moment, and it’s almost universally wrong. You go out and speak to a hundred sales people and they will tell you the amount of wasted time they spend on poorly profiled leads. This is where marketing is doing itself a disservice and earning a bad reputation. If you take all those gates off and you accept that we need to give a lot more away to get something back, those will be better people.
BD
That’s a great point and, again, that shows you what content strategy can do for an organization. If you have objectives set, if you determine beforehand what the purpose of your content is — are you trying to create thought leadership? Then I want to get that valued content out to as many people as possible. If my objective is more about demand generation — trying to generate a lot of leads — then I would have different approach to that. There’s often times an assumption that it’s always lead generation that we’re trying to measure.
CW
Exactly.
BD
I’d like to thank our panel for a lively discussion around content strategy. It’s easy to see now that this is more than just a buzzword in the marketing world today and that it’s actually a necessity for most modern organizations. This is the first in a planned series, so please be on the look out for future discussions. Thanks everyone.
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Now that you’ve heard Movéo and Earnest’s views on the importance of content strategy and showcasing subject matter experts through content, let’s hear their thoughts on the influence that content can have on B2B buyers. Catch up on the first three posts in this series here.
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BD
Some of our clients are somewhat skeptical about the influence of their own content when they shouldn’t be. There’s research out there showing that people value brand-generated content just as much as expert or media content today. There are probably a lot of reasons for that, but it’s no longer a situation, obviously, where you have to rely on media to exclusively get your message out. There’s earned media in the form of social and brand-generated content that has just as much authority. Again, if you are able to come up with a content strategy that takes into account the needs of your users, your readers or viewers, you’ll be able to really tap into the authority that your brand has because it’s no longer about products — it’s about solutions, and anybody can have solutions. It doesn’t have to be something they read about from a third party necessarily.
PH
Content strategy might not just necessarily be about content creation, but it might be about content curation, to use one of those horrible terms — how you can aggregate content across your sphere of expertise and then add great analysis back in, and put that out in a meaningful way. You’re shortcutting the process. We do that a lot ourselves at Earnest in the way we blog and use social. I think of the content curation piece, which is almost like a fast track to great content really.
CW
Some of the most successful businesses out there now, when they’re looking at buying from another business — so a business to business buying cycle — they are genuinely looking for expertise, insight, authority and understanding and they are, just to your point, going to journalists or an analyst. Those are a viewpoint or a number of viewpoints, but the vendors have a massive role in this, and increasingly, organizations are starting to see that they need to come and open up a bit and let some of that expertise out. Organizations just need to be proud of their own expertise and not worried about this and that. Get the expertise out. People care what you’ve got to say. Just say it genuinely.
BD
Certainly in the consulting industry, for years they have basically built their communications models around thought leadership, and a huge percentage of their marketing budgets are devoted to that. I see that model going well beyond that industry now.
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Let’s continue our roundtable discussion on content strategy today with Movéo and Earnest’s answers to a common question about how B2B companies can leverage content marketing to showcase their subject matter experts. If you need to catch up on the series, you can find all the posts here.
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BD
Our clients typically have real subject matter experts, but they’re often not tapping them to the extent that they could be. I was thinking back on a particular client we were working with and one of the hot topics in the industry. They had, basically, one of the foremost experts in that area in the industry on this topic on-staff and we were able to get a lot of traction through an in-depth interview with this person. We were then able to re-package that content into many different forms and to use that to really establish them as a thought leader in that area. That’s another thing — being able to construct a content “supply chain” with your clients is really important.
PH
I think that supply chain piece is really important. Chris talked at the start about how the ways that people buy are changing quite immensely. So it’s about thoroughly understanding that buying cycle. And we often get in front of clients saying, “Well we’re just not getting visibility of RFPs these days, invitations to tender, we know they are happening but we’re not on there, even though we’re respected by the market. Why aren’t we on there?” What they’re finding, after they do some research, is that their competitors are out there with some great content helping individuals shape the way they’re thinking about those tenders, shaping those strategies. They are not even considering some companies simply because they are not out there discussing…helping formulate opinion early on.
Some people say, “We don’t need a content strategy, we’ve got some great campaigns. Our brands out there, we spend a lot on brand visibility as well.” But actually if you go right, right to the start of the buying cycle, people haven’t got the recognition of need yet. They’re in problem identification, and actually, they aren’t evaluating brands at that stage so if there are some choice brands out there with some fantastic content who are helping formulate that understanding — what an organization needs — then they are in a really good position right from the early days as being seen as a key influencer and thought leader in that space.
