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B2B Content Marketing: How are European Marketers Applying it?

B2B Content Marketing: What is it & How are European Marketers Applying it?

Content marketing is one of those terms that are tossed around a lot today and not well understood by many marketers. To put it as simply as possible, content marketing is about providing valuable content to your prospects and customers via a variety of channels. Content marketing is not a sales brochure or a spec sheet or anything of that sort. Content marketing is not just sterile data, but insight coming from expertise. You’re adding value to the product by showing people not what it does, but what people do with it. You have to think more like an editor and ask yourself what serves the interests of customers and prospects. What’s going to get them talking about your brand or your product?  Take off the sales hat, don the editor’s hat and ask yourself if the content serves the reader. That’s a good baseline to start from. … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Content marketing, Research Tagged With: , , , , ,

Whitepaper: B2B Blogging Trends in 2011

B2B Blogging Trends in 2011

B2B blogging can be tricky, but rewarding all the same. The hardest question may well be whether you even want to start one in the first place. That’s one of the questions the folks from Aggregage posed to a number of B2B blogging thought leaders in a new whitepaper titled: B2B Blogging Trends in 2011. It’s a 42 page snappy presentation of tips and insight which will help your organization make the right moves when it comes to blogging for business. And when you consider that only 50% of businesses out there have blogs, you can see the need for some thoughtful expert advice in this area. As well, it also means that opportunities to leverage blogging and establish your company as an authority abound in the coming year. Amazingly, with one of the most powerful marketing tools in existence today, you still have time to get in on the ground floor! After reading this report with the wealth of insight from people such as Jay Baer, Tom Pick, Samir Balwani and Erik Qualman, you … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Content marketing, Research, Social media marketing Tagged With: , , , , ,

Content Marketing: Marketers Finally Start Looking Inside the Box

content box concept

Interactive marketers know since many years that content is crucial. Content is what conversion and conversation with customers and prospects is based on. As been beautifully put to words by management expert Bob Boiko, a website without content is an empty box. Without content there are no emails, no white papers, no landing pages, no blogs, etc. Welcome to content marketing. Online content comes in all weights and measures. Since a couple of years, content is (finally) getting the attention it deserves. And lately, also non-written forms of online content gain attention. For example, think of online video or slideshare presentations. But first and foremost, Internet is still a textual medium, especially when it comes to marketing. It's the words in SEA that generate clicks. An email's subject line is one of the most important reasons why the mail will be opened. The same goes for the words used in a call-to-action in an ad or on a website. They determine if the beholder decides … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Content marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

A Good Reason to Invest in B2B Marketing Content: Sales

B2B marketing

Content marketing is about conversations, conversion, value, social media, lead nurturing, acquisition, inbound and outbound. But in the end it's about Sales 2.0, regardless of the medium. Content plays such a crucial role in this digital era that a new discipline has evolved around it: ‘content marketing’. Content is important in both B2C and B2B marketing but as a B2B marketer I would like to look with you briefly at how content is used in lead management, customer interactions and how B2B content marketing ultimately is…sales. Even though the name ‘content marketing’ is relatively new, the use of content in B2B marketing isn’t. We all have been using white papers to generate leads for decades and we have always known that content is crucial in engaging email recipients, having our websites found and providing our customers with valuable information. However, content marketing is more than that and the fact that a new 'school' as it were, has arisen around it, … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Content marketing, Sales Tagged With: , , ,

Steven Woods: Social Media in B2B and Lead Management

business to business marketing concept

Eloqua cofounder and CTO Steven Woods wrote a book, Digital Body Language, that explores topics related to demand generation and the current transitions within the marketing profession. He has a great blog (really!) carrying the same name as his book. I asked him to share his thoughts about social media and how, according to him, it fits in B2B marketing, marketing automation and lead management. Marketers today are learning about a barrage of new concepts and techniques. Social media is clearly a topic that cannot be ignored, as messages are spread through ever-larger social networks with increasing speed.  Marketing automation is being adopted at rapid pace, altering the way that marketers are able to define and deploy campaigns. Sales teams are increasingly becoming more aligned with their counterparts in marketing as the need to develop a lead management plan for the full lifecycle of a lead becomes an increasingly important strategic imperative. It may at first seem … [Read more...]

Filed Under: Interviews, Marketing automation Tagged With: , , , ,