With Isba’s study revealing that 15% of digital ad spend is unaccounted for, a statistic from the PwC-produced report that prompted headlines, Damon Reeve, chief executive of The Ozone Project, offers his first-hand insight into what this means for the programmatic sector.
“Missing billions”, “big holes”, “the unknown delta”, “mind-boggling” – perhaps not the usual words used to describe a positive first step, yet that’s exactly what this report represents. If, as an industry, we want to create a more sustainable, future-proofed environment for digital advertising we must first acknowledge that things aren’t working as they are. These results certainly speak to what many people already know, and reinforces the need for change.
As we look to create a blueprint for that change, it is a great step forward that it has been driven by advertisers and publishers – as the principal architects – alongside their respective trade bodies. Reversing the trend of disintermediation by programmatic tech vendors, and working together to find their voice, albeit of frustration, is one of the best outcomes of this study, and why it must be a first step and not an end in itself.
In the interests of disclosure, The Ozone Project is an advertiser-led business created by publishers and was developed to tackle many of the issues highlighted in this report. We see ourselves as a significant catalyst for the shift towards a more grown-up advertising environment, one less willing to accept the past shortcomings of programmatic.
The answer is not just what to do next, it’s how we do it
As we entered the 2020s I was convinced we would see an adult programmatic self emerge; still with lots of growth and development ahead, but also less wild and irresponsible than the younger child of the 2010s. Given some of the research in this report was produced in Q1 2020, it’s clear there is still much to do before a more mature self emerges. Nine weeks of Covid-19 isolation has given much time to reflect, and it seems how we go about change will be as important as what we change.
Firstly, collaboration must be front and centre. Through their trade bodies, advertisers and publishers have highlighted some of programmatic’s most persistent problems. An astonishing insight from the report is the confusion over whether advertisers and publishers have the right to access the log data for campaigns they are running. The answer to that question should not require consulting a legal department.
The programmatic supply chain should genuinely work in the best interests of publishers and brands. Together they must build on this work to address one of the critical recommendations from the report; standardising terms and conditions for buyers and sellers, while creating consistent data taxonomies and data sharing rules. This first step will help close the somewhat unhelpful gap that has developed between advertisers and publishers within programmatic advertising.
Secondly, while transparency is at the heart of this study, it isn’t something to fix, it is a way to behave. The ‘opacity by design’ approach that has challenged the sector for years represents institutionalised behaviour that will require a concerted effort to correct. Being open, authentic and human in terms and conditions will be deemed important qualities, rather than hiding the ‘unknown delta’ in technical terms and jargon that almost no one understands. Patience has been worn paper-thin amongst advertisers and publishers, and in this new future we will see vendors and partners selected on operating principles as much as technical capabilities.
A starting point for what to do next
The insights and recommendations from the report itself provide a framework for where future focus must be directed.
As already mentioned, standardising terms and conditions through Isba and the AOP is an obvious next step to remove much of the friction and confusion that exists today. It took PwC more than nine months to receive the information for its analysis, with an often ‘round the houses’, confused approach to who could give permission to use the data.
Brand safety has been high on the marketer agenda during these challenging times with a specific focus from Newsworks’ #BackdontBlock campaign. This new analysis should enable further grown-up conversations around brand safety generally, particularly as the study’s advertisers appeared on an average of 40,524 different domains. That’s not a misprint. 40,524 different websites. How many websites do you visit on a regular basis? Even looking beyond the first page of the Comscore top 3,000 yields some very random websites. Only 19% of campaign impressions were delivered on premium publisher domains, with the vast majority appearing on other websites and the unregulated long-tail of the internet. Responsible advertisers will no doubt be asking questions about where their advertising is going, and what exactly it is funding.
Next, the ‘unknown delta’ needs to become known. In an automated world, one would expect any margin for error to be reduced, and therefore any major gap is concerning. While many have offered thoughts as to why – from currency fluctuations to the compound impact of rounding through the supply chain – it’s important to remember that this 15% ‘unknown delta’ appears in the very small proportion of data that could be matched for the purposes of the study. If this reflects the ‘best of the best’ – major advertisers working with the most premium publishers – the 15% delta will be significantly bigger with smaller sites and smaller advertisers that weren’t measurable.
A final point not specifically called out in this report but to me is inferred in every insight and recommendation, is aligning incentives for each participant in the supply chain to the value they provide. And this extends to the agreements brands have with their media agencies. It will be very difficult to move to a trusted grown-up programmatic ecosystem if each actor is trying to game the system, whether through opportunity or necessity. Remove the incentive for opacity and we build an advertising environment that we all want. It’s on advertisers and publishers to build on this study and remove these incentives.
“The market is damn near impenetrable.”
In last week’s Financial Times, the frustration of Phil Smith, Isba’s director-general, regarding the programmatic world couldn’t have been more obvious. Yet with some time to reflect and digest, what is becoming increasingly clear is that this first-of-its-kind collaborative study has already laid great foundations for building a better future for digital advertising.
In a previous series of posts, we have taken an extensive look at the characteristics of Inbound marketing, distinguishing it from Outbound, recounting its history, and identifying the latest developments. The goal was to describe the evolution of a concept, from theory to practice.
In this post, we will look at inbound marketing from the point of view of B2B, looking at why it’s effective, and focusing on the features that make it stand out: the production, management, and strategic distribution of high quality content (content marketing).
What is B2B marketing?
“Business-to-business marketing refers to the marketing of products or services to other businesses and organizations. It holds several key distinctions from B2C marketing, which is oriented toward consumers.” This definition is taken from the Marketing Solutions Blog from, LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional networking site with over 550 million members.
In a broad sense, B2B marketing content tends to be more informative and direct than B2C content. This is because the purchasing decisions of businesses, compared to those of consumers, are based on the impact on profits. The return on investment (ROI) is rarely a consideration of the average consumer, at least in the sense of a purely “material” investment (the ratio between expenditure and immediate economically quantifiable benefit), but it is an absolutely primary objective for business decision-makers.
B2B marketers find themselves managing a complex sales process, where they are called upon to identify the real decision-makers and the main stakeholders of the target company within a corporate landscape that is unique and characterized by specific organizational charts and decision-making flows. It becomes absolutely necessary to acquire a solid and precise knowledge of the company so as to be able to map the people really involved in the decisions by reaching them with relevant and personalized information.
Who is B2B marketing aimed at?
B2B marketing campaigns are aimed at any individual who has the ability to influence purchasing decisions. This can include a wide variety of professional titles, up to the C-level.
B2B marketing in context
To start getting an idea of the context, let’s take a look at the Sagefrog Marketing Group’s 2020 Marketing Mix Report B2B (download here), which contains data on B2B marketing strategies, competitive trends and emerging tactics:
Between 2017 and 2018, at least 40% of B2B companies invested a tenth of their budget in marketing. Since then, that number has risen to almost 50%
The total expenditure is distributed across the following: 56% on Digital Marketing, 52% on Website Development and 36% on tradeshows and events
Content Marketing (27%) is an area in constant growth
In the 2018 B2B Content Marketing report focusing on Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends by CMI and MarketingProfs, 91% of companies employ Inbound Marketing as “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Of the remaining 9%, 54% said they plan to invest in content marketing within 12 months; 43% have no immediate plans to use content marketing; and 4% have used content marketing in the past.
Quality content: a strong return on investment
The Sagefrog Report highlights that quality content can offer a strong ROI when properly optimised for search engines so that it can be easily found and shared over and over again. This means that quality content combined with clear and graphically pleasing landing pages and contact forms can help provide qualified leads. To achieve this goal, each piece of content must be designed in such a way that it is informative, relevant, searchable, shareable, not overly promotional, and above all, distinctive from that proposed by competitors.
Where the objectives of marketing and sales meet
Among marketers’ main objectives for 2020, in the first place is the need to convert leads into customers, followed by increasing sales, growth in brand awareness, the creation of “Thought Leadership,” and finally, increased website traffic.
What’s important to point out here is that the two main objectives are in fact priorities that marketing and sales teams share, which suggests the need to harmonize operations between the two departments.
Sales and marketing leads get personal
Referrals are the main source of qualified marketing and sales leads (63%). This is by no means surprising: B2B draws useful knowledge and contacts from the interpersonal networks of professionals, who are more likely to invest their time and money working with a company if they can rely on an existing connection.
In any case, if referrals are the main source of sales and marketing leads, inbound marketing is also gaining traction (33%). In both cases, we can read the strong signal of increasing attention to the personalization of communications.
In fact, the marketing experts interviewed by Sagefrog say that in 2020 they will explore personalization strategies (47%) through Account-based marketing (42%), video marketing, (41%) and inbound marketing (39%), AI and automation (36%), conversational marketing in the form of chatbots (33%) and influencer marketing (27%).
How do I create a B2B marketing strategy? The best B2B inbound marketing tactics
The competition to win the attention of customers gets tougher every day. Building a B2B strategy that delivers results requires considered planning, execution, and management. In the aforementioned LinkedIn article, the steps for planning a B2B marketing strategy are outlined. The steps for getting there, as the aforementioned LinkedIn article describes, are part of any inbound plan because they incorporate two fundamental assumptions:
Personalized, useful, and relevant content that authentically conveys the brand’s vision and value system through relevant channels
Continuous listening to the feedback of the reference target, previously profiled
Develop a global vision and select specific and measurable business objectives
Define the market, never forgetting that you’re talking to a person. While B2C goods often have a wider and more general audience, B2B products and services are marketed to a set of customers with specific needs related to their sector, department, and the business function. However, potential customers are also individuals with precise demographic data, urgencies, and priorities.
Identify B2B inbound marketing tactics and channels. Once solid information about the target audience has been defined, determine how and where to reach them. The knowledge gained through the previous step should help. In any case, it is good practice to prepare a list of questions to establish time and place, both physical and virtual, in which to try to intercept those who will be the recipients of targeted marketing actions.
Create content, distribute it and organize campaigns. After deciding which channels to use, plan and implement best practices for each one. Each action should, in any case, be built around some critical elements: a message, expressively translated with a creative approach, a series of useful insights, the most accurate targeting possible and some understandable, transparent and persuasive call to action.
Measure and improve. Consult analysis and metrics reports in order to activate review and fine-tuning processes in real time: even with a well-studied basis, the creation of content and campaigns is intrinsically based on hypotheses and forecasts and must be optimized until you have substantial involvement and conversion data to rely on. Observe the channels, topics and media that resonate the most and then enhance them.
Essential elements of B2B inbound marketing tactics
Truly effective B2B marketing is conversational, focused, and contextually relevant, and a B2B marketing strategy must include a variety of content, most of which is typically inbound: blogs, white papers, social media, email, videos.
Blogs: Regularly updated blogs provide organic visibility and direct inbound traffic to the website, whether institutional or product based. The blog can contain different types of content: copy, infographics, videos, case studies and much more.
Search: SEO best practices must be updated in conjunction with Google’s algorithm, which is changing more and more often, making it difficult to keep up. Lately, the focus has shifted from keywords and metadata to the interpretation of the user’s signals of intent.
Social media: Both organic and paid traffic should always be part of the mix. Social networks allow you to reach and attract potential customers where they are active. B2B customers increasingly use these channels to search for potential suppliers and to inform their purchasing decisions.
White papers and ebooks: Resources containing valuable information can be gated (requiring users to provide contact information or perform another action to download the content) or freely available. Often used as B2B lead generation tools.
Email: Although its effectiveness in recent years has been impacted by the proliferation of spam filters, email is still widely used today.
Video: Content that can be used within many of areas listed above (blogs, social media, e-mail) is becoming increasingly important for B2B strategies
In conclusion: Be human
When it comes to B2B marketing, the biggest mistake we could make is thinking that you are addressing an abstract and impersonal entity. In fact, as it should be clear by now, any marketing action will be aimed at recipients who are first and foremost real people who are driven by emotional and cognitive motivations. Although corporate decisions tend to be more rational and logical in nature, this does not mean that the content communicated must be formal or “robotic” in tone.
For the same reason, campaigns that are too broad will not be able to connect with (or influence) the audience in the same way that those aimed at specific segments can. Defining and segmenting the audience is an absolutely fundamental preliminary step in creating a message that speaks directly to individuals driven by a real need.
Personalization and relevance are essential: “speaking the language” of customers is a valid precondition because it allows us to cross an initial barrier, that of understanding. But it’s not enough: it’s necessary to publish content and ads that thematically adapt to the place where they are displayed. For example, shorter videos with simpler and more immediate narrative hooks work better on social media feeds, while a longer video is probably better suited to YouTube. Put yourself in the end user’s shoes and humanize your relationship with him or her right away. As in any Inbound strategy, even in the case of B2B marketing the starting point—each person’s needs and desires—is unique.
Business-to-business marketers are responsible for raising awareness, generating leads to drive revenue and differentiating their organization from its competitors. A B2B marketer faces a different set of challenges with each campaign. If these challenges are not combatted, they can significantly lower the business’s efficiency and revenue.
As the president of a marketing agency, here are the top challenges I’ve observed B2B marketers are facing today and how you and your team can combat them:
1. Generating Quality Leads
In today’s digital era, many platforms exist to publish and promote marketing content. The digital space is so cluttered with content, consumers no longer have to seek out information. Push notifications, geo-targeting, customized ads and messages, and site pop-ups deliver tailored content to every user.
B2B marketers can struggle to create enough demand for their content. Because of the plethora of content syndication opportunities available today, B2B marketers often lack understanding of which channel is right for their message.
An effective way to address this problem is doing research on the type of content your target audience actually wants — such as video, blogs, etc. — about the topics that are keeping them up at night. Creating high-quality content that provides the reader with value will gain their trust, and they will come back for more.
2. Knowing The Right Target Audience
Strong marketing strategies should satisfy the needs of customers at every level of the customer journey. You must know your audience and what they care about in order to reach them. But, there’s a lot that goes into a B2B buyer’s decision-making process, such as how their company does business and their personal preferences. This can make it challenging to determine your target audience.
Studying your customers’ buying process enables you to segment your buyers by their pains and their needs, so you can deliver a more personalized experience when communicating and marketing to them.
3. Proving ROI
Return on investment attribution remains one of the most common challenges facing many B2B marketers. In order for a marketer to comprehend the effectiveness of each piece of content, each campaign and the overall strategy, a marketer must be able to attribute a relatively accurate amount of revenue to them.
B2B organizations often find it difficult to prove ROI because of the multiple points of contact a marketer must make before a business purchases their product or service. B2B purchasing decisions often involve interacting with a number of professionals within a company in a variety of ways, so the sales cycle is much longer and more complex. Tracking the revenue that these interactions generate can be extremely time-consuming and convoluted, as the purchase process is not linear and the financial benefits of the marketing effort are often not reaped until long after their execution.
I advise organizations to tackle this issue by facilitating two-way communication between your company’s marketing and sales teams, in addition to implementing reporting tools into your regular analysis.
4. Optimizing Your Website
A B2B company’s website is a marketing asset that is working all day, every day, to generate traffic and convert prospects into customers. Keeping your site functional, fast and user-friendly is essential for any B2B business.
This is an umbrella issue that encompasses a variety of challenges, including:
• Optimizing SEO;
• Producing strong messaging that speaks to the pains of your buyers;
• Engaging website users with your content;
• Designing pages in an easy-to-read, yet appealing style.
It takes different skill sets to effectively manage all these types of projects, so having strong marketing partners is important to ensure you can get the right skill for the right role.
5. Strategic Marketing Planning
To plan or not to plan? While it takes time, I firmly believe that to effectively market to your customers, you must know them inside and out and plan accordingly.
Ask yourself the following questions about your customers:
• How do your customers form their plans?
• How do they evaluate solutions?
• Where else do they search for information to educate and later purchase?
• Where do they get recommendations and purchasing advice?
I believe by conducting buyer persona research, you can overcome the common challenge of marketing to the wrong consumer or marketing with the wrong message at the wrong time. Customers’ answers to these questions can inform email marketing, social media, outreach to influencers and more.
So, you have some or all of these challenges. Now what?
From creating a personalized website experience to generating quality leads, marketers face a different set of challenges. A seasoned team of marketing strategists can help you identify and overcome the marketing challenges your B2B is facing. Whether it is an in-house marketer at your organization or employing a marketing agency to fill your unique gaps, surround yourself with those who are professionals in the space so you can get the results you need.
Experiential content will help drive 2020’s digital agenda, and savvy B2B marketers should take notice.
Experiential is a word with subtly differing meanings depending on which setting it’s used in, however at the core of each definition is the fact that it all boils down to experiences.
Experiential content makes us a central part of a story, and not just a passive subject receiving a one-way brand message.
Use of experiential content has grown over the past several years as online technologies have reached a level capable delivering vibrant and engaging motion and sounds alongside clickable, swipable, and all other manner of interactivity to put you front and center.
With 98 percent of consumers more likely to make a purchase after an experience (Limelight), and 77 percent having chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that delivers a personalized service or experience (Forrester), why haven’t more B2B marketers begun to use experiential content?
Experiential Content’s Advantages
In a seemingly million-message-a-minute online world, experiential content offers a number of advantages.
It removes us from all other messaging, if only for a short while, and allows us to enter a world under our own control, where we can interact as we see fit, learning or buying at our own pace, all while creating a story that intertwines us with brand information and messaging.
In 2020 experiential content comes in many forms, no longer limited to just the real-world selfie booths and similar elements of the past, with just a few examples listed here:
Virtual Reality (VR)
Augmented Reality (AR)
Cloud-Based Digital Assets from Ceros and Other Platforms
Quizzes and Polls
Interactive Flipbooks and eBooks
In a way online gaming has been leading the way for decades when it comes to digital experiential content, and only recently have brands and marketers started to bring this power to B2B advertising campaigns.
An example of experiential content comes in the form of our Break Free of Boring B2B Guide, featuring interactive insight from a variety of B2B marketing industry influencers. Click here to enter the full-screen experience.
Experiential Marketing Embraces Digital Storytelling
Experiential content is also intertwined with both storytelling and customer experience (CX), together forming an extremely powerful triptych of B2B marketing strategy.
As a key component of experiential content, storytelling becomes even more personal and memorable when you’re a key part of the messaging experience a brand is sharing, and being remembered is more important — as well as more difficult — today than ever, which is why forward-thinking B2B marketers are utilizing experiential tactics in their 2020 tool-kits.
The importance of storytelling in the customer journey has become less of a secret in the past five years, as marketing experts and the data to back up the fact have combined to make brand storytelling a trend for the decade ahead.
The other key element of experiential content — CX — appears to offer an ideal match, combining to form two important facets of successful B2B marketing.
What better way to deliver a stellar customer experience than by creating memorable brand storytelling using experiential content?
Two years ago we saw the rise of real-world physical pop-ups from the likes of 29Rooms achieving considerable success on Instagram and other social media platforms, however a shift to creating these worlds virtually online as immersive experiential content has taken place in 2019 and into 2020.
Experiential content also appears in WARC’s recently-released ninth-annual marketers report for 2020, which places it alongside purpose and product as three of the most important elements needed for brands to achieve greater success this year.
Some marketers and brands are pulling back from an over-investment in technology that has taken a certain amount of focus away from creativity, the same report’s survey data shows.
Indeed, among the survey’s respondents — almost 800 global client and agency-side executives — one of the top elements comprising experiential content, VR and AR, was seen as being one of the most important emerging technologies in 2020.
Another big part of experiential content is online video, a near-unanimous selection on most top marketing trend lists, as it continues to receive the type of swift growth in ad spend dollars that has helped make online video a big success for Instagram, YouTube, and increasingly TikTok.
Over 80 percent of marketers plan to increase spending for online video in 2020, with 33 percent planning to boost spending on TikTok this year, according to the WARC survey. In the U.S. alone digital video spedning is expected to increase by over 31 percent in 2020, to $5 billion. (Winterberry Group)
Cloud-based experiential content platform Ceros offers both an overview guide and an on-demand webinar for learning more about the technology, and offers up their own take on just what the term means.
“Experiential content is digital content that is purposefully designed to create an immersive experience for its consumers through some combination of interactions, animations, embedded media, and storytelling. It encourages active participation in an effort to form memorable, emotional connections between the consumer and the brand or creator,” Ceros notes.
We’ve looked at what experiential content is, explored a few examples of how B2B brands are using it successfully, and showed how it is likely to see growing adoption in 2020 and beyond.
It takes considerable time, effort, and resources to implement a standout experiential content campaign, which is why many brands turn to a dedicated agency.
B2B marketers can be very focused on the short term, and who can blame them? Sales are putting on the pressure for a constant stream of leads and business leaders have quarterly targets to hit to keep the shareholders at bay.
It’s this short term thinking that means the majority of activity produced by B2B marketing teams is below the line, bottom of the funnel, sales ‘activation’ activity (call it the boring stuff) and not the bigger, fame and brand building advertising activity that the majority of B2C brands seem focus on (the glamorous stuff).
Now, couple this with the fact that the average tenure of a CMO is now just 43 months (and that new incumbent wants to shake things up and make their mark on the business), and it’ll come as no surprise that only 4% of B2B marketing teams measure impact beyond six months.
But a new report from the B2B Institute and LinkedIn, packed with research from Advertising Effectiveness stalwarts Les Binet and Peter Field, says this short-sightedness is damaging the growth potential of B2B brands.
According to ‘The 5 principles of growth in B2B Marketing’, in order to grow, B2B marketers need to start shifting efforts (and budgets) towards a 50/50 split between short term activation activity and long term brand building (the stuff that makes you famous).
However, it’s pretty clear we are starting on the back foot. B2B marketers are incredibly sceptical about the value of brand building and many have a misconstrued view of the effect brand building has on the business.
Just 30% of B2B marketers, for example, believe advertising has an effect on pricing power and only 50% believe reach is a strong predictor of success. It’s pretty clear businesses need to start thinking differently about longer term brand building. But as with any shift, there has to be a strong reason to do so.
So, we have distilled the findings from the report into four arguments you can take to your board/sceptical CMO to convince them to put more budget into longer term brand building, B2B advertising and fame defining campaigns and activities.
Argument one: “Look! You can’t argue with the facts – brand building will build our market share and our bottom line.”
Let’s start with a fundamental rule. The share of voice rule. A rule that has been known and stayed consistent for the last 50 years. The rule goes thus: brands that set their share of voice (share of all category advertising expenditure) above their share of market, will tend to grow.
This has been well known in B2C, but Binet and Field have shown the trend is true in B2B – a 10% extra share of voice, for example, will lead to a rise in market share of 0.7% per year.
Put simply: shout louder than the competition in a way that gets you noticed and you will expand. That alone is worth the investment.
Argument two: “We can kill two birds with one stone with this! Not only will brand building attract new customers, but it’s a great way to reassure our current customers they have made the right choice and feel proud about being our partner.”
Put simply, brands grow in two ways, either by gaining more customers, or by selling more to current customers. In B2B, the focus is often put on the latter thanks to new customer acquisition costs being high. But this piece of research shows us that actually the best way to achieve real growth is to acquire new customers, meaning more has to be put into activity to attract them.
But shifting budgets to attract new customers doesn’t have to come at the cost of current customers – putting money into brand campaigns also helps reassure existing customers they have made the right choice (and means they can show off to their mates in the pub about working with a cool, well known brand.)
Argument three: “Don’t trust me, trust Danny Khaneman! We need to be the brand that is the easiest to choose when a potential customer is shopping around.”
While everyone seems to think B2B buyers are purely rational beings, the truth is just like anyone else, many of the decisions they make are not made on purely rational thoughts or processes but on brands, products and services that are the most ‘mentally available’. As the economist Daniel Kahneman says, “the brain is largely a machine for jumping to conclusions”.
This is due to the Availability Heuristic – a rule that says given the choice between several options, people prefer the one that comes to mind most easily. It’s the reason that when you are shopping you are most likely to pick up Fairy washing up liquid and Kelloggs cornflakes, rather than unknown brands.
Maximising mental availability, or being the easiest brand to choose to buy, is just as important in B2B as in B2C and the best way to do this is to build fame through brand building campaigns.
Argument four: “A suit isn’t a shield for emotions! After all, Business people are people too, they just happen to be at work. So we need to use the power of emotion to ensure people engage with our brand. And guess what? The best way to do that is long term advertising campaigns.”
As a marketer, one of your key aims should be to make people feel positively towards your brand, even if they can’t say why. That comes from creating emotions and feelings around your brand and positioning yourself in a way that becomes more firmly embedded in a buyer’s memory than functional product messages.
This will translate into real business results, thanks to the fact that if we like a brand (or feel a positive emotion towards it) we are more likely to hold positive beliefs about its benefits. And it shows in the results – emotion based, fame building campaigns outperform rational ones by a margin of 10x. Even the tightest CFO can’t say no to that.
B2B marketers need to need to take off those short term blinkers and start thinking about how we build brands that grow, become famous and build the business over the long term. While the short term activation activity is still key, we need to start readdressing the balance and we hope this starts today.
A big thanks to The B2B Institute, LinkedIn, as well as Les Binet and Peter Field, for their excellent research on which this whole article is based. You can download the full research report here.
Smartphone traffic now accounts for the majority of visits to retailers, but mobile conversion rates lag behind desktop. We take a look at the reasons for this.
A decade on from the release of the first iPhone, mobile shopping is massive. Much of this is thanks to Apple, and the many smartphones which followed, but there are still obstacles for retailers to overcome.
According to stats from Monetate, smartphone traffic worldwide to retailers is at 56.2%, and 34.5% for desktop.
However, this mobile traffic is converting at less than half the rate of that on desktop, at 2.25% compared to 4.81% for desktop. Even tablet fares better, converting at 4.06% on average.
We’ve seen the same pattern in our own stats. Around half of all visits to retailer’s sites come from mobile, but just 36% of purchases take place on mobile.
It seems that people are happy to browse on mobile, but many still prefer to buy on desktop, so let’s look at the reasons why.
There are several reasons why people prefer to buy on a laptop or PC. For one, it can be easier to navigate around the site and view images on a bigger screen, so some shoppers may browse on mobile and select products later on.
People are also more likely to buy on desktop when purchases are more complex. Travel purchases are generally more expensive and complicated – only 18% complete bookings on mobile.
Much of the issue comes down to checkout. Indeed, the add to cart rates shown above suggest this. While mobile conversion rates are less than half that of desktop, add to cart rates aren’t so far behind.
Even in sectors where shoppers are more likely to use mobile, such as fashion, mobile conversion rates still lag behind desktop.
Fashion sites attract a greater proportion of sales on mobile. In fact, this is the only sector to attract the majority of its sales from mobile shoppers (51.39%).
However, data from our recent Fashion Ecommerce Trends Report finds that fashion conversion rates are almost twice as high on desktop when compared to mobile.
Mobile usability on fashion sites has improved greatly, but some customers are still reluctant to convert via mobile devices.
The average mobile add to cart rate is 10.4%, compared to 12.9% for desktop. This implies that people are adding items to their cart at similar rates, but many more are bailing out during checkout.
The biggest issue behind lower mobile conversions is the checkout. So how can checkout be made easier? Here are three ways to do this…
People hate registering before they begin a purchase, and it seems like hard work for mobile shoppers, so providing a guest checkout option is one way to improve conversion rates.
It’s a barrier for customers, and one that isn’t necessary, as they can complete registration after purchase anyway. Streamlining forms makes checkout easier and faster, reducing hassle for shoppers, and removing sources of friction where people might abandon checkout.
Sites can allow users to autofill address and payment details saved on their phone’s browser, or postcode lookup tools to reduce the number of steps customers need to take.
Small details matter, such as defaulting to the most appropriate smartphone keyboard, like the numeric version for entering payment card details. It’s about making it easier for customers through marginal improvements.
Payment methods matter too, and providing alternatives can make it easier for mobile shoppers. Card details take time to enter, but PayPal and digital wallet options like Apple Pay can make payment fast and smooth.
Mobile is a challenge for retailers, but now that customers have shown they’re willing to browse and buy on mobile, it’s all about making the payment process smooth and easy for shoppers.
Feature Image Credit: Photo by William Iven on Unsplash.
I’ve had variations on the above conversation more times than I can count. I’ll usually leave it at “Wendy’s Twitter account” in the interest of changing the subject. No one has the patience for, “I write business-to-business content designed to help people do their jobs better, which also builds affinity for a client brand, with the end goal of influencing purchase decisions.”
So most people think I just write fun stuff all day, that it’s a purely creative job. But my fellow B2B marketers know better. Content marketing requires an incredibly diverse set of skills, and “innate writing ability” isn’t even the most important one.
Here’s my list of must-have B2B content marketing skills. If you’re looking to get into the career, fill out your team, or, say, hire a marketing agency, keep these in mind.
12 Must-Have B2B Content Marketing Skills
This list is divided into two categories: The “hard skills” that you learn through instruction, and the soft skills that rely more on personal development and human interaction.
Four Hard Skills
#1 – Search Engine Optimization You don’t have to be a SemRushin’, Google Analytics wizard to be a content creator and strategist. But creating great content does require a solid understanding of modern SEO practices. You should know how to understand search intent, dig into ambiguous keywords, and create best-answer content that meets search demand.
#2 – Social Media Marketing You may have a dedicated social media person or team, but content marketers should still know how to create compelling B2B social posts that attract attention without breaking the brand voice. You should be up to date on what type of content performs best on each platform.
#3 – Influencer Marketing Content marketers should know how to co-create content with influencers. That means writing a framework that allows for collaboration, asking the right questions to guide influencer responses, and even conducting intelligent interviews. Content marketers’ expertise makes all the difference in the resulting content feeling cohesive and compelling.
#4 – Measurement Measurement is what turns content into content marketing. Content marketers should be able to strategize, create goals and metrics that match them, track progress, and ultimately optimize over time.
Eight Soft Skills
#1 – Empathy The heart and soul of any content marketing is empathy. You have to be able to take the customer’s perspective and make a human connection. Empathy is even more important in B2B content, because it keeps the content focused on people.
It’s easy to lose the human connection when you’re writing about container-based software-as-a-service platforms. That empathy for the people, the buyer, the end user, should be what drives the content.
#2 – Creativity I would argue B2B content requires even more creativity than B2C. The difference is having to work within strict limitations. Big B2B brands have whole departments concerned with brand reputation, brand voice, standards and practices, approved image libraries and fonts… Content creators have to produce something eye-catching and meaningful without breaking any of these limitations. And they have to know when it makes sense to push the boundaries.
#3 – Communication The success of B2B content depends on explaining complex concepts in simple terms. You may know all the ins and outs of your solution, but odds are your audience won’t. Clear, jargon-free, conversational writing that offers value is the only way to succeed.
#4 – Organization This skill is important for any B2B marketer, but especially if you work at an agency. We’re working on a dozen different clients at any one time, each with multiple assets in various stages of development. Without organizational skills, it would be impossible to get everything done on time (even with a dedicated project manager on staff).
#5 – Motivation I read recently about a man who had been on the payroll of a major corporation for over a year without ever doing any work. Seriously. Somewhere between restructuring and management turnover, he simply got separated from responsibility without losing his salary.
That won’t ever happen for a B2B content marketer. There’s nowhere to hide: We’re responsible for concrete, quantifiable, and quality deliverables. There’s no such thing as slacking off, and there’s no such thing as writer’s block. The ability to push past obstacles, buckle down and get the work done is vital.
#6 – Confidence Part of the job description is defending and explaining your work to stakeholders. For an agency, that includes account managers and clients. For a marketing department, that might include the executive suite, too. B2B content marketers need the (justified) confidence to advocate for content and approach they know will be effective.
#7 – Humility The flip-side of confidence is the ability to put the content ahead of one’s individual ego. B2B content is bound to go through layers of review, with each stakeholder adding their own critique and suggestions. Humility means that you can take in constructive criticism and apply it with an eye toward producing the best content possible. While confidence is key, knowing your way doesn’t have to be the only way is equally important.
#8 – Collaboration Finally, B2B content marketing is a team sport. It’s not about making a name for yourself — you have blog posts for that. It’s about partnering across areas of specialty to create something stunning. I found that my content got even better when I involved the design team from the start, for example. Working closely with design, SEO, influencer and social specialists only makes the work better. Here’s a shot of the gang I get to work with every day:
B2B Content Marketing Is a Game of Skill
I’ll admit it: Before I got into the field, I thought content marketing was just getting paid to write all day. Now I know there’s a lot more to the job than just filling buckets with prose. Content marketers are writers, strategizers, empathizers, collaborators, and so much more.
While there are some who think the expression “influencer” is an expired term, the role of influence on B2B buying decisions is irrefutable.
According to the World Federation of Advertisers, 65% of multinational brands will increase influencer marketing spending in the next 12 months and there’s good reason for increased confidence: The 2019 Content Preferences Survey from DGR reports 95% of respondents favor credible content from industry influencers as a top preference, a 30% increase compared year over year.
Not only is influencer marketing one of the fastest growing areas of our marketing agency, it’s one of the disciplines where we are seeing trend setting marketing performance.
For companies operating in the B2B space, here are 7 influencer marketing trends worth digging in to for 2020 and beyond:
At the time, buyer demographic and behavioral data was difficult to find, marketing campaigns were more expensive to launch and harder to track, and market pulse was tougher to discern.
All that has now changed.
Replacing the old world of B2B marketing is a new landscape that is highly favorable to creative and strategic marketers. Instead of creating big and expensive ad campaigns, marketers are creating thoughtful content that attract inbound customers.
Generating quality inbound leads is the key to the success of B2B marketing. Not only does it help accelerate your sales cycle – it also creates happier sales reps, and bolster revenue growth.
We developed this playbook to help you accelerate sales cycle velocity, and retain and expand its existing client base. Let’s dive in.
The Organic Inbound Marketing Playbook for B2B Companies
The thrust of this playbook is simple: launching an inbound B2B marketing strategy does not need to be expensive.
It doesn’t require tons of money for Google AdWords and PPC. Neither does it require that you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on large-scale events and sponsorships.
However, it does require the implementation of thoughtful content that truly engages your buyer. To do this, use the nine techniques we share below to help you build recurring organic inbound traffic.
Technique #1. Dial into your target audience
Every great inbound marketing strategy starts with a perfect understanding of your target audience – your ideal client profile.
If you don’t have a clear picture of your target audience or ideal client profile (ICP), use these two simple tactics to master and understand your ICP:
Make a list of your existing client base, enrich their data, and map their buyer journey.
Interview your best clients and ask them about their specific use cases, needs, and experience with your product.
Phase I. Account-level research
This research starts at the account level, where you need to identify insights about the companies that buy you and start building a list of target accounts. It includes a few steps:
The Basics – Businesses often overlook tremendous value in determining their ideal customer profile by neglecting to dig deeper. Within this space, you’re only discovering topical information such as employee count, revenue, location, or industry. This is just a starting point, not where your research should end.
Account-Based Research – Here is where you determine what are key strategic priorities for the accounts you’re targeting. You’ll also want to ask questions such as: how does your solution help them achieve their goals? What can the technology stack of your target customer tell you? Account-based research gives you an extra level of targeting above and beyond company size, revenue, and industry.
Buying Triggers – Here is where you’ll want to find out about your customers: which activities inside an organization indicate your solution could be a fit for them?
For example; at OutboundView, when organizations are hiring inside salespeople, it typically means our services could be a fit. When a new VP of Sales is hired, that is a good time for our team to reach out and discuss their lead generation strategies, because they’re typically reviewing new sales processes. If we can tell a company isn’t getting any inbound traffic, that tells us that the target needs outbound marketing.
Identifying the triggers that drive organizations to buy is absolutely critical for top of funnel targeting. Finding target accounts that are showing “buying triggers” for your business should be the highest priority for your top of funnel outreach efforts.
Phase II. Buyer research
Who’s your buyer? Not ideal company – we’re talking the customer writing the checks or using your products. We think about buyer personas in two main categories: Decision Makers and Doers.
Decision Makers are the individuals focused on high-level, strategic outcomes, and are usually writing the check for your product or service.
Doers are your users focused on the day to day tactics supporting your product or service.
Why is this an important distinction? Each requires different strategies to spark interest in your product or service; but most importantly, each requires a different messaging to initiate a discussion.
Buyer personas outline the specific value proposition, thought-provoking questions, and resources needed to lead efforts toward an opportunity for each type of Doer or Decision Maker.
Here is a simple list of steps to follow when building your buyer personas:
Start small with a goal of 2-3 buyer personas.
Think pain points – What makes your customer’s job difficult? Keep in mind these pain points need to be related to their overall job, not just pain points your solution solves for.
Perform customer interviews and ask your buyer the tough questions, don’t just make assumptions.
Make them tangible! Create bio pages for “Bill the Buyer”, ”Sally Seller” and have fun with it!
Think “Personally” and “Professionally” – How does your solution help your buyer reach their goals, both personally and professionally?
Create a unique value proposition for each type of persona.
End with messaging – As the last step in the process, build messaging that aligns with the customer’s pain points and helps differentiate your solution.
To see who is engaging with and responding to your content, create an updated database of people who are following you on social media and subscribed to your email list.
This includes adding calls-to-actions for your blog, events, and gated content on your website to passively capture emails over time. Then, use tools like Clearbit or DiscoverOrg to enrich the data you collect with detailed firmographic information about who your audience is and how well they fit your ideal client persona. Or, have someone curate the list for you by hand.
Doing so will enable you to build an audience over time and get maximum return-on-investment for your publishing efforts.
This may take a little bit of work, but it will pay huge dividends in the short-term and long-term. You’ll learn which topics and personas to lock in on and focus your future efforts appropriately.
But your time and resources are precious – so we recommend fixating content on one of two areas: thought leadership on your philosophy and storytelling about client success.
What is thought leadership, you ask? Two things:
An annoyingly-named and often-abused piece of business terminology.
Content that explains the philosophy behind the product or service you offer.
Once you find your target audience, you should use BuzzSumo or Ahrefs to find topics relevant to your buyer that have high Google search volume and a high volume of social media mentions.
Why use thought leadership? Because like Simon (Sinek) says, “The best way to inspire action is to ‘start with ‘why.’’”
Think back to Mitch and Murray’s favorite acronym: AIDA.
Lastly, recall that people buy products and services (especially expensive B2B solutions) from brands they know, like, and trust. Thought leadership builds trust and awareness and table-sets future action from your buyers.
The second type of content you should create is flywheel storytelling: telling client stories in evocative fashion by placing them on the Hero’s Journey.
In these stories, your client (note: not your product) is the hero. They are facing a challenge or obstacle to overcome, and your product aids their success.
Here, it’s important to build up your client as a subject matter expert in their field. This means establishing their credentials, backstory, philosophy, challenges, and how they discovered your product or service.
From there, you can chart their path to success and use their words to describe your product or service’s role in getting themfrom A to B.
Technique #3. Package content for maximum distribution
The idea here is expediency. Rather than churning out a bunch of unique, disjointed pieces of content, you can turn one epic piece of content into a multi-purpose series of articles, videos, and podcasts.
Remember – not everyone consumes content in the same format. The beauty of this method is that you can create content in the format of best-fit for your entire audience.
To gain maximum exposure for your content, focus on the best distribution channels. For B2B, a solid email newsletter featuring valuable thought leadership, industry research, and client-led insights is a great way to connect with buyers and build trust.
We also advise supplementing email with social media posts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et cetera, depending on how much time your ICP spends on those networks.
Finally, we recommend uploading video, audio, and presentation content to social media networks like YouTube, SoundCloud, and SlideShare. Optimize the content for SEO so that it can be found via search and gain the maximum visibility over time.
Technique #4. Create trust and credibility with consistent output
We found similar value in the concept of leveraging content to create and enhance authentic relationships with clients and audience.
An important best practice for this method is customer storytelling.
You should foreground your clients in your content as much as possible. Make them the heroes of articles and case studies capturing their success story with your product or service in grand detail. Explain their background, philosophy, challenges, success path, and subsequent gains from choosing you as a vendor.
From there, you should map the distribution of these stories to the audience of best-fit. If the hero in your client success story is a VP of Sales for a SaaS company, then route that story to similarly-situated prospects and clients in your sales, marketing, and client success funnel.
The bottom line is – you should always seek to route content to your audience of the best fit. Use data and well developed personas to make this happen.
Technique #5. Leverage content to build authentic relationships
Once you commit to a content-driven inbound marketing game plan, it’s important to know that you’re playing the long game.
Content publishing pays back exponentially over time. It may take months or years – but you’ll see it. Provided you commit to publishing steadily and consistently.
Let’s say you publish 3 articles per week – and two out of three posts feature a client or a key ally in your industry. You’re setting yourself up for success.
Think of it this way – publishing 2 articles each week that cross-promote a client or peer leads to 104 goodwill relationships over the course of a year, possibly more if you publish content that features multiple clients or peers.
Content creation is a long-term investment with escalating payoffs in the form of heightened SEO, a strong database, referral-minded channel partners, and powerful press relationships.
These, in turn, lead to increased qualified lead velocity from content you’ve already created.
Technique #6. Build your brand on what others say about you
Every brand needs to cultivate reviews and testimonials that describe their value.
Creating a committed campaign that incentivizes happy customers to review your company is an incredibly powerful, worthwhile investment in this day and age. Whether it’s Google Reviews, Yelp!, G2Crowd, or another vendor, it’s important to have your clients affirming your value publicly on the internet.
The second component to building your brand is creating clear statements of philosophy, or why you exist. This can be accomplished through published mission statements and consistent thought leadership output that dials into your purpose as a company, which we covered in Technique One.
Last and not least, always be aware of what is being said about your brand across the web and social media. This means using a powerful media monitoring tool to help you stay on top of real-time mentions.
Technique #7. Serve the entire customer lifecycle
Content should serve the entire customer lifecycle – from first touch to renewal.
This ensures maximum value from your publishing efforts and total artillery coverage for sales development, account executives, and customer support.
Again, we look back to Technique One. The goal is to provide content with the breadth and depth to add value across as much of your audience as possible. This includes:
Cold prospects
Warm prospects
Lost prospects
New clients
Long-term clients
Lost clients
The broader the scope of impact a piece of content has, the better it serves your bottom-line. If you are only creating content designed to impact the top-of-funnel, you are vastly under-serving your audience, your company, and yourself.
Technique #8. Track and analyze the entire funnel
This technique is a critical component that should be applied to everything you do.
To get the most benefit from your content-driven inbound marketing efforts, you should use a tool to analyze what content and channels drive results.
Invest in a marketing automation system – HubSpot, Marketo, and Pardot (especially if you use Salesforce) are all great options.
Devote a few dollars to a content tracking tool like Guru to build your internal knowledge base.
Use Outreach, Cirrus Insight, or SalesLoft to send trackable content at scale and give your sales reps the ability to see what messaging, links, and attachments get prospects to respond.
Keep track of the data-driven insights these tools give you. Then triple down on what is working and fix areas that need improvement.
Technique #9. Emphasize process, details, and fundamentals
The final technique is also a ‘must apply’ for all aspects of the content-driven inbound marketing playbook.
The key mantras here are to:
Create transparent, consistent workflows.
Strike balance between speed and quality control.
To accomplish the former, use a project management tool like Asana or Trello to keep your team on the same page. These tools will also help you strike the balance between speed and quality control.
Being detail oriented when is comes to content means doing every little action that will help you maximize SEO.
This includes adding alt titles to your images, using the proper text formatting with headers, et cetera, and using an SEO tool (we love Ahrefs) to discover the best keyword opportunities for high Google rank.
Here’s a high-performing blog post whose title was chosen specifically for its high search volume (400 per month) and low keyword difficulty (less than 5 backlinks were needed for a top search ranking).
Going the extra mile is as simple as emailing a partner or client you feature prominently in a piece of content to:
Give them a heads up they are being recognized.
Gently ask if they can share it across their channels.
The biggest driver of content is the willingness to do these two things. Once you do, you can guarantee a sound return-on-investment in your content marketing efforts to drive inbound leads
YouTube stars and the Kardashians are not what you’d typically expect to discuss with one of the most sought-after marketers, who spends her days thinking about how to help people better understand how technology will shape our lives.
However, if from my interview with IBM’s Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Michelle Peluso, reinforced one core theme, it is that sometimes your most powerful influencers come from unexpected places.
IBM
Influencer marketing has become commonplace within B2C marketing. Now, more than ever B2B companies are racing to do to the same. The fact is that influencers are pivotal to brand success and remain a growth lever to promote products and inspire community. B2B influencers might just look different than a stereotypical fashion influencer posing in front of the Coachella Ferris wheel or the fitness trainer promoting protein powder.
Peluso has the task of marketing a legacy brand within a world of digital content and consumption. This new wave of consumerism leans heavily on influencer marketing; especially as the next generation of millennial and Gen Z buyers and consumers look at technology through a more digitally savvy lens:
“When you have a company that has reinvented itself over 100 years many, many times, there’s a legacy that’s quite attractive. But we have to tell our story in the right way – we’re always working on the latest, most cutting-edge technology, and helping clients make a difference in their companies and in the world.”
Peluso and I talked at length about a topic that is integral to the future of B2B marketing. Here are three takeaways about the current state of B2B influencer marketing gleaned from IBM’s strategy.
It’s all about authenticity.
Similarly to B2C trends of using nano influencers over macro influencers, Peluso encourages quality over volume, “It’s not necessarily about how many followers someone has, but rather what makes them valuable and interesting to their audience. It’s crucial that B2B companies commit to preserving an influencer’s authenticity as credibility is paramount.”
IBM’s ad campaign, “Dear Tech, Let’s Talk,” features an array of celebrities, influencers, and IBM employees and advocates. This includes IBMer, Lisa Deluca — a Distinguished Engineer and mother of four. She wants the world to know that STEM isn’t just a boys club. Peluso is determined to show that, “Whoever you choose to associate with your brand – they have to have that authentic connection. It simply can’t be manufactured or bought.”
Enterprise marketers must remain focused on finding influencers that relate to their products and values, and in turn, whose personal communities and followers will do the same.
B2B influencers differ than B2C influencers, and that’s awesome.
B2B influencers engage and thrive across a variety of offline and online channels – both inside the workforce and online through communities like LinkedIn or Reddit. These influencers are able to on their unique ability to convert non-physical concepts like artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing into consumable and exciting ideas for the masses…not just techies.
This is extremely important as content creation has a huge effect on the sales cycle as 80% of B2B buyers consume at least three pieces of content before talking to a salesperson.
“Employees are often an untapped influencer base for enterprise companies. Companies must find a way to identify these people, learn about their audience, and then support them to expand their mission and goals,” Peluso shared.
“In regards to external brand advocates, IBM works with this one developer, for example, Tanmay, who started learning how to use IBM’s AI platform (Watson) when he was a little kid. He has this uncanny ability to break down the technology in ways that people can understand. He does Facebook Live, YouTube, attends our events, and is becoming incredibly influential in his sphere.”
B2B influencers have a different audience than their consumer counterparts, which requires a different approach to content creation. Luckily, their audiences are passionate and drive results that can have a huge impact on the bottom line.
Give life to the intangible.
With sophisticated technologies like artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and blockchain in their technology stack, IBM brings abstract products to life through creative content. “What I think is really interesting is that, even now, a lot of what we do, you can’t see and touch. There are so many ways that AI and Cloud are touching people’s lives that you can start to make real,” Peluso explained.
One of the most famous examples of this is when IBM Watson won Jeopardy in 2011, defeating super champion Ken Jennings. This event brought the topic of artificial intelligence into mainstream conversation. And more recently with Project Debater, which showcased how AI could effectively debate a world-class human debater.
Another includes IBM engineer, Benin Saffo, who used machine learning and cognitive computing when she built a custom model to define different hair types through Watson Visual Recognition. By taking photos of hair, she could classify the unique characteristics associated with different hair types and further demonstrate the power of Watson.
By illustrating complex technologies in a digestible way for the modern audience, B2B influencers can share product vision and capabilities in an entertaining manner.
In the end, storytelling delivers.
Through understanding the importance of authentic storytelling and humanizing complex technologies, B2B companies can use influencer marketing for brand affinity and sales. The companies that get influencer marketing and social media right are those that consistently create engaging stories and compelling visual content, all with genuine intent for the audiences and stakeholders they serve.
Fortunately, B2B companies of all sizes have more opportunities than ever to connect with like-minded people through the power of influencer marketing.
I’m a content marketing consultant in Silicon Valley and millennial marketing expert. My book “Oh Snap! You Can Use Snapchat For Business” can be found here. Check out my website too!
I’m a freelance content marketer, author, and entrepreneur who helps brands engage millennials. I’ve been featured on the Nasdaq, NPR, NBC News, CNBC, Huffington Post, VentureBeat and named an Instagram Marketing Expert from Foundr Magazine and Social Media Examiner. I wrote a best-selling book, “Oh Snap! You Can Use Snapchat for Business” which IBM named their ‘Book of the Month.’ My strong understanding of the digital landscape comes from my career managing social media for Virgin America and Kiva. I’m also a millennial marketing post-graduate lecturer at Ireland’s Digital Marketing Institute and social media expert witness. When not snapping, I spend my free time at Burn Pilates, reading at Dolores Park, and hosting art and charity events.
