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B2B brands must embrace digital tools to thrive in ‘the great reshuffle’

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By Penry Price

The pandemic and emergent technologies are transforming the future of work. LinkedIn’s Penry Price writes about how B2B brands can leverage existing tools in order to remain ahead of the curve.

People are actively rethinking their careers, including where, how and why they work. We are in the middle of a ’great reshuffle’ and B2B brands are facing new challenges, including targeting prospective buyers who are leaving jobs for new opportunities.

B2B marketers have to face what’s in front of them: thousands of moving or vanishing sales targets. As of August 2021, 55% of the workforce was looking for another job. For B2B players that have spent the last few years building out prospects lists, such employee migration means many of the targets in which they have invested time and resources to identify have since left or are thinking about leaving their current employer.

For B2B advertisers, this employee migration can be frustrating because you’re starting over from scratch for a decent chunk of your target audience. For B2B sales managers, it brings up another conundrum – are your top sales pros taking their lists with them? While these issues may keep some B2B players up at night, this industry is prepared to adjust and thrive during the great reshuffle.

Investing in digital

In the past year and a half, marketers have gone from in-person conferences to online marketing outreach, webinars, paid advertising and more. That means that today’s B2B marketers need digital engagement tools that build relationships with groups of buyers and other decision makers. Marketers also need to invest in tactics to reach business prospects with meaningful, relevant content that drives interest and sales faster than traditional wining and dining.

B2B brands need to know how to reach the right audience with the right message to show their value, drive connection and demonstrate consideration in ways that are only possible with the frequency that online content and advertising makes possible. Therefore, B2B marketers must invest more in digital tools today than ever before, not only because of the global shift we’ve made online, but also because it’s efficient, personalized and measurable.

Leaning into buyer intent

At the same time, that crash course in all things digital prepared B2B players for this moment. B2B marketers think more and more about leveraging first-party data on their owned digital properties and combine it with the intelligence of other digital platforms to organize customers and prospects into buyer groups based on professional attributes, similar to how B2C segments online audiences.

But buying groups are only one piece. Given that only 5% of potential buyers are in-market to make a purchase, marketers and sales professionals must rely on signals to understand how, when and where to reach their audiences. That’s where buyer intent becomes even more critical.

Buyer intent allows marketing and sales teams to better understand how likely customers and prospects are to purchase a product. For instance, let’s say the marketing and sales team works for a retail-focused chatbot supplier. This intelligence allows them to avoid taking a list of 1,000 and making an irrelevant offer to most of them, wasting time and resources, and instead focus on the right 100 retail CTOs with the right message.

This precision can transform full-funnel strategies in significant ways. Since casting a wide net to capture as many leads as possible is a thing of the past, B2B marketers can now spend their budget more wisely and deliver a more targeted cohort of prospects, enabling sales teams to more efficiently build relationships with qualified leads rather than going from one proverbial fishing hole to the next. All of this allows B2B players to move prospects down the funnel in a more efficient, nurturing way for both parties, which should lead to more deals being closed.

For those who spend their days thinking more about B2C marketing, buyer intent is essentially the equivalent to the purchase intent that revolutionized the retail and CPG space 15 years ago with the advent of online search advertising via Bing, Google and other platforms. Indeed, buyer intent, coupled with a real understanding of buyer groups, is a powerful data point that B2B marketers need not only in this post-pandemic world, but also in the privacy-first environment that we live in.

Connecting with smarter conversations

The players that made it through the steep learning curve of the last 20 months should feel heartened. Even if they’re concerned about reaching the right buyers at the right time as a result of the great reshuffle, we’re in the middle of a pivotal moment for both marketing and sales professionals. The good news is, marketers can now target in a much smarter way.

Indeed, stronger marketing efforts are in reach, which will make buyer-seller conversations more intelligent and efficient. And that seems to be an underlying lesson of the last 20 months – everyone wants their time to be well spent.

For more, sign up for The Drum’s daily US newsletter here.

By Penry Price

Penry Price is vice-president of marketing solutions at LinkedIn.

Sourced from The Drum

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How native advertising amplifies content among B2B advertisers’ target audiences

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By Laura Bakopolus Goldstone.

B2B thought leadership needs to be supported by sponsored content

You probably engage with sponsored content several times each day and don’t even realize it — which means it’s working as intended.

Sponsored content uses native advertising to deliver companies’ content to their intended audiences on platforms where they are already engaged. Over the last few years, native advertising has cut through the noise of a seemingly saturated digital ad industry.

While all ads promote a visual representation of a brand with some corresponding message, native advertising takes the ad a step further by amplifying thought leadership in a place where the reader is actively going to seek out new information. Instead of the advertiser pushing ads onto audiences, ads are placed within publications audience members already visit and enjoy, increasing the likelihood that the ad will resonate with the reader.

It’s no surprise that sponsored content through native advertising yields an increase in brand affinity and purchase intent. As a proven way to resonate with audiences, sponsored content could be the answer B2B advertisers have been seeking.

A primer in native advertising, content’s best complement

Sponsored content is backed by native advertising, which is a form of digital advertising that places paid ads within the format of a webpage, mimicking its style and user experience. Native ads are clearly labeled “sponsored” or “paid,” but because their subject matter tends to align with that of the article on the page, audience members tend not to mind that they are reading ads — a feat the digital advertising industry has always sought to achieve.

Instead of simply being glossed over, the text on the ad is highly likely to be read — not just seen. Because native ads are placed within an article, the reader has already read several lines before his eyes reach the ad. Therefore, the reader is already in the habit of reading lines from left to right and the native ad’s headline fits right into that pattern. In fact, reading a native advertisement yields 308 times more consumer attention than processing image content, resulting in increased brand recall and a higher likelihood that the brand’s message will resonate with the reader.

Native advertising is extremely valuable to B2B marketers because it supports thought leadership. It takes a content asset that has been strategically crafted with the target audience in mind and it creates a figurehead for that asset in the form of a native advertisement. That ad is then placed in front of viewers in places they prefer to engage, increasing the likelihood of a positive experience with the brand.

In essence, native is more about the content than just brand awareness. It is about an idea resonating with someone more than it is about a brand’s graphic looking appealing. And when we connect over an idea rather than a look, the connection is more meaningful and more likely to last.

If content is king, then native advertising is the megaphone that amplifies its message to the masses.

Choosing the right partner

Marketers see value in running sponsored content through social networks and other experienced publishers. However, they may find themselves going up against walled gardens that are hard to scale or report on; as such, brands should inquire about scaling and analytics capabilities prior to deploying native ads with a tech vendor. If reaching your audience at scale and knowing how well your campaigns ran are important factors in understanding how native advertising fuels your business goals, then these two elements may be key differentiators when choosing the best technology company to deploy your sponsored content.

If your technology vendor offers both, native advertising can also be paired with display advertising to enhance engagement and achieve more than 18 percent higher lift in purchase intent, 9 percent lift in brand affinity, and 200 percent more visual focus as editorial headlines. Utilizing both forms of advertising can provide a stronger approach than only leveraging one.

Advertisers may also find that diversifying their media plan will strengthen their offering by providing them with a customized, best-of-breed option. Complementing existing native advertising efforts with other sponsored content solutions can contribute to a well-rounded ad campaign that will expand the reach of your most valuable content among your highest valued business audience members.

By supporting existing campaigns with sponsored content, B2B advertisers can position themselves as thought leaders among their target business audiences while increasing the likelihood of resonating on a deeper level and improving brand affinity. Implementing this approach will put B2B advertisers in front of their customers in a more positive light and will likely fuel longer term relationships, thus improving business outcomes for all involved.

By Laura Bakopolus Goldstone

Manager of content marketing, AdDaptive Intelligence

Sourced from DIGIDAY

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6 Content Marketing Questions: Answers Will Improve Your Strategy

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By Ana Jovanovic

Content marketing is receiving tremendous acknowledgment among advertisers to reach clients. Indeed, 92% of B2B advertisers utilize content marketing to reach their intended interest group, and 86% B2C advertisers consider content marketing a key strategy to target clients, as indicated by the Content Marketing Institute.

In any case, not every single content marketers can accomplish their goals with regards to getting content marketing ROI. Some are effective, while many battles to attempt their content marketing endeavors productive.

In this post, the talk will be about six inquiries that will enable you to adjust your content marketing strategy and guarantee achievement.

1. What Problems Are You Solving?

The primary goal of your content marketing system is to solve your audience’s issues.

So the primary inquiry your content marketing strategy ought to have the capacity to answer what issues you are settling. What’s more, to take care of your clients’ issues, you ought to be very much aware of their pain points.

Here are some approaches to distinguish your clients’ pain points:

  • Conduct qualitative customer research
  • Interview your customers
  • Look at your reviews
  • Run online surveys
  • Scan forums/groups relevant to your niche

Content that goes head to head with the audience’s problems, get noticed, read and shared.

2. Have You set Objectives for Your Content Strategy?

Does your content marketing strategy have composed objectives? If not, you should set objectives now. Without defining objectives, it will resemble flying in obscurity and shooting randomly and hoping to hit the objective. Obviously, this isn’t something that you need to do. So set content marketing objectives. Following are some shared objectives that you might need to accomplish through content marketing:

  • Increase brand awareness
  • Increase traffic to your website
  • Generate Leads
  • Improve retention
  • Create customer loyalty

content marketing

3. Have You Fixed KPIs for Your Content Marketing Goals?

To know how much advancement you are making toward your content marketing objectives, you should track key performance indicators (KPIs).
Have you settled KPIs for your content marketing objectives?
Next, we should talk about regular KPIs you can append to your content marketing objectives:

Brand Awareness– Social share, comments, likes, views from partner sites
Traffic to Your Website– Google Analytics
Lead Generation– Leads generated by content, landing page conversion rate
Customer Loyalty– Repurchase, regular subscription
Leads Conversion– Leads to customer conversions through content pieces

4. Does Content Echo Your Audience’s Tone?

On the off chance that your audience didn’t feel right after reading your content, despite the fact that your content is super helpful, odds are your dialect is excessively straightforward or excessively complex that doesn’t match with the dialect of your audience.
So it is important that your substance should match with your gathering of people’s tone.
Furthermore, to figure out what tone is the best for you to embrace, you should know your audience and discover what they like and how they associate with one another.

5. Do You Have an Aggressive Content Promotion Plan?

Brian Clark, the founder of CopyBlogger, stated:

’’Creating great content and not getting it noticed is an online marketing sin.’’

There is no reason for making content if it doesn’t get noticed, read, and shared by your audience. Do you have a forceful content promotion strategy to make your content reach a vast audience? If not, act quick. You have the accompanying four content promotion channels:

1- Owned Channels– Homepage, email lists, owned communities, blog, app
2- Earned Channels– Influencer Outreach, media outreach, placed content
3- Shared Channels– social media organic, content sharing communities
4- Paid Channels– Native ads, paid social media, display ads, sponsored content

6. Are You Ready to Tweak Your Content Strategy?

A fruitful content marketing strategy requests a consistent cycle of investigation and changes. So you can’t settle your content procedure in a stone. You need to change it and adjust it depending on how your audience reacts to your content. The most ideal way is that you should make a rule of routinely assessing your content marketing strategy after a specific timeframe – track key performance indicators (KPIs) to know your advancement and discover the purposes behind not performing.

You should realize that content marketing sets aside some time to demonstrate results, however, the outcomes remain. It is smarter to set realistic content marketing strategy desires at first.

 

By Ana Jovanovic

Sourced from JOSIC

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