Webinars are one of the most efficient methods of content marketing out there. However, they’re really only effective when they’re engaging. Think about it— how many times have you tapped out ten minutes into a webinar because it was so… boring? Don’t worry, you can admit it here. We’ve all sat through videos that definitely didn’t have webinar best practices in mind. We’re here to teach you how to make sure your webinars aren’t the ones that have people clicking out ten minutes in.
Choose specific topics
Webinars are a great lead generation tools. But their main purpose is to serve your audience, not boost your email numbers. When a webinar holds a viewer’s attention, Adobe found that the average attendee stays onboard for 54 minutes. When considering whether you should invest the time and money it takes to produce a webinar, give some thought to what your topic is going to be. The best webinars are specific, thorough and address certain issues that are important to their audience.
Add value with thought leaders
Consider hosting a panel of thought leaders in your industry, doing a deep-dive on a niche topic, or hosting a detailed how-to video in the form of a webinar. If the ideas you’re considering have been done before, or are a thinly disguised sales pitch in the form of a webinar, hold off on execution until you have a more fleshed out topic to talk about. Wordstream gives this great piece of advice: “If you claim that your webinar is truly amazing, be sure you can live up to your own hype.
Don’t talk at the camera
I know, this seems like Webinars 101. But we all know there are plenty of webinars out there that don’t follow this very simple rule. Many people look at webinars as videos for people to watch, and technically they are. But this outlook can lead to some pretty dull videos unless you have the energy of a YouTuber. A better way to look at a webinar is to think of it as something that viewers are engaging with, so it’s your job to be engaging. Nobody likes being talked at, so talk to them as if they can respond directly to you. When the webinar begins, welcome your audience and give them a quick rundown of how the presentation is going to go. Let them know the topics you’ll be covering and in what order— this will allow viewers to know whether the webinar is relevant to their interests and if they should skip ahead or join later.
Use technology to your advantage
You’re obviously pretty technologically savvy if you’re hosting a webinar, but take it a little further. Rather than using screenshots of a website you’re discussing, do a screen share and walk your viewers through the process. Use markup capabilities or even a slide presentation to illustrate your points. However, I cannot stress enough, do not read slides. Do you enjoy having slides read to you that you are completely capable of reading yourself? No? Then don’t put your viewers through that! While it’s perfectly fine and even to use slides to enhance your presentation or give your viewers some visual examples of what you’re discussing, it’s the opposite of fine to use them as a crutch. Don’t read slides in webinars, presentations, meetings, or anywhere, really. A great way to avoid falling into the trap of robotically reading along with your slide presentation is to write a script. Whether you choose to rehearse and memorize the script or just create a list of talking points to make sure you reference, having that backup document with you will keep you from going off on tangents or losing your train of thought as well.
The more the merrier
Consider bringing another person on board. Or two people. Or a whole panel! While a one-person presentation is sufficient, having more people onscreen partaking in an organized discussion is a great way to keep a conversation lively enough to hold a viewer’s attention. Another way to engage your audience is to actually engage. If they’re viewing the webinar live, dedicate a portion to viewer questions that they can send in via a hashtag. There are even webinar platforms that allow you to insert polls and other interactive aspects into the presentation. Just because you’re not hosting the webinar in front of a live audience doesn’t mean you can’t act like you are!
OK, so people won’t be leaving your webinar with a cool gift bag, but there are other things your viewers can leave with:
Actionable advice
Contact information
Recommendations
Whitepaper
PowerPoint slides (Adobe also found that 50% of webinar attendees download presentation slides— so it’s worth the effort!)
Search Engine Journal also suggests making your takeaways only available during the webinar or from your webinar promotion. This makes the materials exclusive, and people are more apt to take advantage when there’s a time limit. Sure, these things aren’t as cool as a Soda Stream or whatever, but they’re valuable in other ways. Make sure these materials end up in your viewers’ inboxes no more than 24 hours after the webinar ends— you want to stay at the forefront of their minds!
Have you ever heard of a healthy, successful company with just one person behind it? I haven’t either. Differing personality types, barriers, dependencies, and meeting deadlines are some reasons for cross-departmental avoidance. The tension between teams is especially common when it comes to your marketing and sales departments. Fortunately, departmental collaboration doesn’t have to be that way.
Improving Cross-Departmental Collaboration
Here are a few key points that highlight why departmental collaboration is not only crucial to a company and but how it’s also beneficial to each team member.
Viewpoints and Perspectives
Every individual has a unique background, point of view, and a pool of experience that brings a unique perspective to a situation. So bringing a group of people together to discuss solutions or ideas can result in more innovative thinking. Sometimes, just bouncing the bud of an idea off of someone else turns that bud into a flower. Solution-based thinking leads to new perspectives, and problem-solving becomes more creative. A new set of eyes is always a good thing. An idea that might have been right under sales’ noses all along could be brought to the forefront by marketing.
Team Building
Collaborative working allows ideas to cross-pollinate. Discovering that your lead creative also has experience with business development can certainly help bring the team to a solution. But it also enables everyone to realize how their work and skills fit into the bigger picture and the company’s high-level goals. We all get tunnel vision sometimes – and a fresh perspective opens doors. Departmental collaboration between teams that have historically been at odds with each other, like sales and marketing, can also eliminate the illusion of a hierarchy. When we are all able to see the value each individual brings to the table, we can execute each other’s ideas and elevate the project as a whole. This insight, in itself, builds team strength.
Individual Growth
Understanding and recognizing the value that comes from making sure each person on your team feels rewarded and incentivized to participate is key to finding the potential in collaboration. A lot of growth can happen when there is space to speak up and listen to ideas, benefiting both sales and marketing. Not only is that good company practice, but it’s excellent for each team member as an individual.
Company Impact
When there is an understanding between sales and marketing, there will ultimately be better results. Think of a time you had the opportunity to explain exactly why you felt a certain way or why you did something someone else may not have understood. I bet being heard felt good. Departmental collaboration fosters a healthy environment. And in a healthy environment, coworkers will establish deeper connections and make more progress toward both team’s end goals. Understanding each department’s challenges and goals cultivates creative solutions and encourages teamwork and growth. Departmental collaboration creates an environment for learning and understanding. It leads members of both teams to work harder for each other, innovation to blossom, and goals to flourish. Like Aristotle says, “The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” Alicia Griffin is SmarkLabs’ Project Admin and Ops Support Specialist. With a drive for seeing people reach their full potential, Alicia is passionate about creating collaborative and inclusive environments. Otherwise, you’ll find her staring for hours at a painting, stuck in a book or hanging out with her super handsome golden retriever, Bentley.
The internet is a vast, infinite hole of everything you’ll ever need to know. What makes up just about everything on the internet from the B2B-centric articles that you read to the games you play is all content. In the modern age of internet jargon, we tend to think of articles or blogs when we hear the word “content,” but there’s so much more to it than that. Webinars? Content. Video posts? Content. Social media feeds? Content. According to HubSpot, content is any piece of your marketing plan that continuously demonstrates who you are and the expertise that you bring to your industry — which brings us to the topic of this particular piece of content: your B2B company’s content strategy.
Why you need a strategy
You don’t put anything out into the world without any purpose behind it, do you? (At least, from a business perspective, I’m not going to draw any conclusions about your personal Twitter feed.) So why would you release content willy-nilly, without thinking about your strategy for rolling it out? But where to start? First off, think about what role content plays in your company’s marketing strategy. What kinds of content marketing ideas do you have that not only fall seamlessly into your company’s strategic marketing process and maybe even enhance it?
When creating your content strategy template
It’s understandable to be intimidated by the idea of creating a bigger picture plan for content that you’re used to just creating when you get the chance. However, you’ll quickly realize that doing this allows you to have more purpose behind your work, and it might even begin performing better once it’s more tailored to your audience. Here at SmarkLabs, we have ten tenets in mind when brainstorming our content strategies:
Publishing consistently
Have you ever looked at a webpage and seen that the last thing they released was from 2017? Or even earlier? Did you stop and think that maybe they’re not even in business anymore? The key to any content strategy template is regular publishing — not only do you want to stay at the top of potential customers’ minds, but you don’t want them to write you off for inconsistency.
Content should provoke action or have a goal
With each piece of content that you create, make sure there’s a reason behind it. Maybe you’re not trying to make a sale with a specific blog post, but perhaps you’re trying to establish trust with your audience, position yourself as a thought leader, or inform people of your services. There might not always an action taken after consuming a blog or video of yours, but there should always be a goal behind it.
Content is relevant to the buyer’s journey
Nobody is going to read or watch something that doesn’t serve them in some way. Try to make sure your content reaches your potential customers at an appropriate time in their buyer’s journey and, hopefully, even moves them forward to their next step.
Clear documented production process
Chances are, you’re not the only one at your company producing content. Whether you’re working with a team of writers, videographers, and graphic designers, you’ll want everyone on the same page when it comes to the production of these items. If there are deadlines, everyone should be well aware of them and given ample time to produce their pieces.
Align content with the strengths of the brand
This is yet another opportunity to get your company in front of people who may not be familiar. You want it to emphasize your strengths, not your shortcomings. What do you want people to know you can do?
Prioritize original content
Sure, you might not break new ground with each blog post you write or video you create. But that doesn’t mean you should just regurgitate what’s already out there. Whatever you create, you want it to be on-brand for your company and add a little something new to the conversation.
Set a clear plan for promoting content
How active are you on social media? Do you regularly send out newsletters? How big is your reach, and how do you plan to grow it? These are things you should ask yourself when creating your content strategy template. Some things, like visual content, work better on social media, while written content might perform better in a newsletter.
What about SEO
For a while, there was a conversation about how important SEO really was in the world of high-quality content marketing. Needless to say, it’s still pretty important — it just takes more thought than it used to. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing. We’re talking about thorough keyword research and targeting now.
Think about tone and style
Your content is an extension of your brand, so it should seem like it. If the rest of your content marketing ideas are conversational and light, your videos shouldn’t be bland. If your marketing materials are strictly professional, you shouldn’t be using slang in your blogs.
Prioritize visual content
Humans are naturally drawn to visuals over blocks of text. If you’re writing about a topic that’s explained better with charts, have a graphic designer on your team put something together that will really enhance the piece. This is especially important if the piece is shared on highly visual mediums like Instagram.
Two weeks into the new year and still not seeing any progress on your company page? You may be sitting behind your laptop right now, wondering how in the world you can get out of the “startup” social phase and begin growing and establishing new leads from LinkedIn. According to Top Dog Social Media, 50% of B2B web traffic originates from LinkedIn, making your company page essential for a successful B2B business.
How can I upgrade my LinkedIn company page and see more traffic?
Believe me, you’re not the first to ask, and you won’t be the last.Boosting your company page can seem like a hassle and take months to see results. However, by implementing certain tools, you can start seeing results much earlier. That’s why we’ve created a list of three steps to begin executing today.
Increase visual aids
That’s right, bring on the pictures. Did you know that 90% of information sent to your brain is visual? That’s why we encourage you to post more images, such as infographics. According to Demand Gen Report, infographics can increase web traffic by 12%. Executives from companies have little time to consume media, so quick visual aids can help deliver information along with attracting more viewers.
Posting at the right time
Daily posts at the correct time of day are essential to increasing web traffic, along with attracting engagement. According to research provided by Hubspot, “On average, the best time to post on LinkedIn is between 3 PM and 5 PM CDT on Wednesdays.” Now, does that mean you can only post between those times on that day to become successful? Absolutely not. But you’ll see that this is during the time of day where people are either getting out of work or have a break in their day, giving them time to consume certain media. Being consistent with your company page is another crucial aspect of a successful media channel. Try to post three to four times a week and make sure you’re active by engaging with followers on comments, or shares.
Establish Credibility
To initiate web traffic (and maintain it), you need to establish trust with your followers. Give them a reason to follow your company page.
How can you achieve this?
Provide your audience with beneficial industry insights. Don’t get me wrong, posting updates, blogs, ‘meet the team’ inquiries are essential to a company page, but adding sharing latest industry news establishes credibility.
Voilà!
Take a step back and analyze your company page for a minute or two. Ask yourself, “what am I lacking?” Or “where are my successes within my page?” Initiating these tools and analyzing your page will benefit you, starting 2020 on a high note!
Addison Hesterman is an Account Manager and Marketing Specialist here at SmarkLabs. She graduated from Iowa State University and has a passion for helping businesses grow!
When your company is launching a new product or service, or even just refreshing your brand messaging, you need to have a solid strategy backing you up. You might think, “well yeah, you shouldn’t unveil anything without having a strategy in mind.” However, “just a strategy” isn’t enough. What you need is a go-to-market strategy (GTM).
What’s a go-to-market strategy?
Your company’s go-to-market strategy is the plan to deliver your unique value proposition to customers, using both your inside and outside resources. While this might be easy to confuse with a marketing strategy, the most significant difference between the two is that a marketing strategy is for your brand. Your GTM strategy is unique to your latest launch and a subset of your overall marketing strategy. The whys, whos, whens, and hows, are four significant differences that set your go-to-market strategy apart from your marketing strategy:
Why: The purpose of your marketing strategy is to create an approach to achieving a competitive advantage. But your GTM strategy’s objective is to make sure a specific product launch reaches the right audience.
Who:Typically, your B2B company’s marketing team works together on the brand’s marketing strategy. A smaller product marketing team usually runs GTMs.
When: Though your marketing strategy is ongoing and continuously changing, it always includes marketing for your brand as a whole. A GTM strategy typically has a fixed timeline and is focused on a new aspect of the business.
How:Communication is vital in both your marketing strategy and your go-to-market strategy. While your marketing strategy communicates the brand promise to your customers, your GTM is delivering the vision of the product. The brand itself takes more of a backseat.
Why a GTM strategy is necessary
Think back to your college days when you always seemed to have another paper due, alongside your other assignments. Chances are, you kept yourself organized by establishing an outline before diving into your paper. That’s a lot like working on your go-to-market strategy. You’re likely working on other marketing projects as well. Outlining your plan to stay on track is a great way to know what direction you’re headed in, ensuring you’re targeting the right people.
Establishing your go-to-market strategy
When building your GTM, you need to ask yourself a few essential questions beyond what new product you’re trying to promote. Getting clear-cut answers to these questions will help you target your marketing to the correct audience. It can also allow you to determine whether you’re on the right path. This is always good to know before you launch a full-on plan that may not even lead potential customers through the buying journey.
Who are you selling to? Is your target audience the same as your overall marketing strategy? Or are you looking to promote to a small subset of your audience?
What is your distribution strategy? How about the sources of marketing automation you’re going to use? What do you have experience with, and what will you try for the first time?
Will you also use indirect sales channels? If you choose to leverage partners, you need to understand and communicate why you made that choice.
Some other aspects to take into account are your industry competitors and similar products and services that are already available on the market. Are you offering something completely new? If not, establish how your product sets you apart from other options. What benefits do potential customers get from working with you instead of a competitor?
Building your go-to-market strategy
As you probably would guess, HubSpot is a great resource when it comes to making any marketing strategy — including your GTM. HubSpot’s even outlined seven steps to take to get it up and running:
Identify the buying center and personas
You didn’t think you’d be able to skip establishing your buyer personas, did you? The Harvard Business Review states that an average of 6.8 people are called upon to have a say in whether or not a company decides to use a B2B product. These seven roles may vary, with some people filling more than one. But most companies have the people in the following roles calling the shots. Which ones are you targeting?
The Initiator: Shows initial interest and spreads the word
User: The person who will spend the most time with your product
Influencer: The one convincing the rest of the team to get on board with your product
Decision maker: Makes the final call about whether or not to make the purchase
Buyer: The one with the company credit card
Approver: Final person who pushes the initiative along
Gatekeeper: The one who needs more convincing
Craft your value matrix and messaging
The value matrix is a breakdown of each buyer persona, their problems, and how your product can solve them. How will you tailor your message to each persona? As we’ve established time and time again, a little bit of personalization can go a long way.
Understanding your buyer’s journey
While each buyer persona might have a different reason for seeking our your new product or service, chances are, each buyer’s journey is essentially the same: Realizing there’s a problem that needs solving > Looking for solutions > Researching which solutions work best for their specific needs and budget There is no excuse for not having a full understanding of it! The first step is typically the top of the sales funnel, the second step has them heading toward the middle. Then, the bottom of the funnel is where you leverage the opportunity to show your potential customer that your product meets their needs the most.
Choose a sales strategy
Like go-to-markets, sales strategies aren’t one-size-fits-all. HubSpot suggests taking complexity, scale, and costs into account when determining your strategy. Will you pursue a self-service, inside sales, field sales, channel model, or a mix of more than one?
Generate interest
Depending on how large and established your B2B company is, generating interest in a new product or service can be the most challenging step in developing a GTM. Luckily, we have all the information you need about demand generation in the B2B world in the Smark Blog.
Create content
Content marketing is likely a mainstay in your marketing strategy, but don’t discount its effectiveness in your GTM strategy. Leveraging SEO and driving inbound traffic to your site is a great way to generate interest and inform potential customers of your upcoming launch.
Optimize
You don’t only see commercials for products that haven’t come out yet. So why would you stop promoting your new service upon launch? Here is where optimizing comes in. As you watch how your content performs, you’ll see how many customers enter the sales funnel, and how many conversions you make. So you can determine how to best reach the people who need your product most.
Download our Buyer Persona Checklist!
Think about your selling strategy
I know, I know, it’s strategies upon strategies upon strategies. But that’s what marketers sign up for! You can build up plenty of hype around your new product or service, but your customers need to know that they’re getting a good deal — so your selling strategy is also tied in with your GTM. Will you rely on your customers to take the leap and purchase your new product upfront? If you’re well-established with a good track record of product launches and a solid list of contacts, this may be a viable option. However, if you’re more of a newbie in the B2B world, you may want to set up a free trial offer for a new service or discounted system for a new product. Another option for an up-and-comer in the B2B space is to use service-oriented channel partners to sell on your behalf. Otherwise, make sure to cover all of your bases. From warm emails and direct mail to your industry contacts to AdWords and other SEO campaigns, every little bit counts.
Now what?
Just because you put this much work into establishing your GTM doesn’t mean that it can’t be fluid. It should be, like your overall marketing strategy. Once your product launches, you probably won’t have much of a choice but to adapt your GTM strategy to what you’ve learned about your buyer’s journey. This plays into the “optimize” step that HubSpot laid out. The more you learn about your customers and how they respond to your products and services, the more effectively you’re able to market to them. If all goes according to plan (and you plan to keep this service around a while), your GTM strategy will eventually roll into your B2B company’s overall marketing strategy. Isn’t marketing wild?
As we’ve discussed in our blog post, WordPress vs. HubSpot: Which CMS is Best for Your Business?, choosing the right CMS for your B2B company is a big decision. If you’ve done any research on the topic, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that WordPress is one of the leaders, powering 35% of all websites. You might be asking yourself, though, “What about all of those WordPress security issues I keep hearing about?” Let’s talk about whether you need to worry and what you can do to protect your website.
WordPress security
According to iThemes, WordPress runs on open source code. They also have a team that’s consistently monitoring the platform’s security and fixing any security issues that may come up in the core code. iThemes also states that the top five WordPress security issues include:
Brute force attacks: The trial and error method of entering multiple usernames and password combinations until a successful combination works.
File inclusion exploits: Using vulnerable code to load remote files that allow attackers to gain access to your website.
SQL injections: When an attacker gains access to your WordPress database and your website data through WordPress’s MySQL database.
Cross-site scripting: Getting a victim to load web pages with insecure javascript scripts.
Malware: Code used to gain unauthorized access to a website to gather sensitive data.
Who should you worry about?
Chances are, you probably don’t have to worry about a guy in a ski mask with the ability to type faster than the speed of light, like in a ‘90s movie hacking your WordPress site. A more typical “attacker” is a bot or a botnet. That ski-masked hacker might have created these bots, but they’re an even bigger pain than a single attacker. Most of the time, hackers make these bots to steal website data or send spam. However, in more extreme cases, your website can be hacked to attack other websites or even host malicious content. Since this kind of activity can ruin your reputation as a brand, it’s crucial to stay on top of your website’s security so you can resolve any potential security breaches early on.
What you can do
This information sounds daunting, especially if your customers do transactions on your website. But there’s some good news to keep in mind: WordPress really isn’t any less secure than any other CMS when you take the same common-sense precautions you take everywhere else on the internet. Starting with using a strong password. Using a weak password is an amateur mistake. If your WordPress password is “Password123,” “pa55word” or “blink182,” open a new window and change it right now. Seriously. Right now. Change it to a password with a mixture of letters, numbers, and characters that you don’t use elsewhere. Since WordPress regularly fixes issues in the core code, it’s imperative that when there’s a WordPress update available, you install it. I know we all hate updates. But always putting these necessary evils off is the ultimate way to leave holes in your website’s security. Your themes and plugins will also periodically require updating, so make sure you keep on top of that. It can be tempting to use free plugins and themes, rather than paying for some of the attractive ones from WordPress itself. However, plugins and themes from untrustworthy sources are some of the most common ways that attackers can access your website. This is especially true of torrented versions of plugins and themes that usually cost money. In this case, you will probably get what you pay for — and then some. When it comes to plugins, though, using a trustworthy, authenticated security plugin can add an extra layer of protection to your website.
So, do I really have to worry about WordPress security issues?
Yes and no. While a security breach on your site is serious, it’s no more likely to happen if you use WordPress, as long as you make an effort to keep it secure. Taking preventative measures like using strong passwords, not using untrustworthy extensions, and keeping your software updated is like getting a flu shot and washing your hands during flu season. There’s still a chance you’ll get sick, but the risk is much lower.
Relationships can be tough, both in your personal and professional lives. The concept of two people with differing viewpoints and experiences working together isn’t always going to be easy. That said, unless you live off the land alone in the woods, you’re going to be working with other people. Luckily, there are ways to make working together in the professional world easy and even enjoyable. If you’re running a B2B business and have hemmed and hawed about whether to bring a B2B marketing agency into the picture, here’s what you should know.
Do I need an agency?
There are a few reasons a company realizes it might need to hire a B2B marketing agency. Maybe you’ve noticed that your workload has gotten too big for your team, or you need expertise that people in-house may not have. Content Marketing Institute suggests that the types of companies that would benefit from some agency assistance include:
Early-stage startups that need a flexible marketing solution
Mid-sized or large organizations without sufficient internal resources
Organizations with temporary staffing challenges
Business professionals who want to build their industry reputation
Many people think the best route to take when choosing an agency is making sure the team has experience working in their particular industry. This easy in the B2C world, where there are entire agencies dedicated to a small sector. But it can get trickier when you’re looking for a B2B marketing agency. Most B2B companies are pretty niche, so it’s likely that the agencies you talk to have never worked with another company just like yours. The best approach is to think long and hard about what challenges you’re hoping this agency will help you work through and ask potential agencies if they’ve ever dealt with a similar situation, and what they accomplished.
Finding the one
What do you do when you’re considering any purchase? You read reviews. You ask your friends and colleagues. While this is undoubtedly a good jumping-off point when looking for your perfect agency, it’s not the only thing you should rely on. When evaluating your options, discuss some situations that may arise or challenges you’re currently having in the marketing area, and see how they would approach your case. While agencies that you’re consulting with can help you work through what you might need and tailor their services for you, it’s essential to have a general idea of what you want and expect out of your B2B marketing agency. Sometimes it can be hard to nail this down in the beginning, especially when there are a lot of people involved in the decision-making process. Avoid a “too many cooks in the kitchen” situation and include managers, bosses, executives, and anyone else who might want to be involved early on. You might not need them on every conference call, but they should understand the top objectives and the steps you and your prospective agency are taking to achieve them.
Transparency is key
When your team and an agency team begin working together, they’ll ask you what your goals are. Keep those in mind when assigning projects and revisit them often. Things are going to change, and expectations are going to shift, so you must relay any pertinent information as quickly as you can. Don’t wait until your B2B marketing agency team has finished a project to tell them that your direction has changed. Doing this will lead to a strained relationship on both sides, especially if the team is made to feel as if the misdirection was their fault when they didn’t have all of the information they needed. You can’t read their minds, and they can’t read yours! To avoid roadblocks like this, keep lines of communication open. Formkeep reported that communication, or lack thereof, is one of the biggest problems that arise between clients and agencies. Neither party should leave the other hanging for days if a question needs to be answered. Establish a collaboration process that is clear about roles, responsibilities, and expectations for everyone involved. The agency you decide to work with will likely kick this discussion off, so it’s best to come to that talk prepared.
Reviewing content
As we talk about in our blog post, The Non-Marketer’s Guide to Reviewing and Approving Content Efficiently, one of the biggest reasons a marketing campaign stalls or stagnates is a failure to review and approve content. While it can be daunting to comb through a backlog of content, it’ll be better for your campaign and your relationship with your agency to get through that content quickly. Some tips for doing this, outlined in further detail in the linked blog post include:
Set expectations early on
Focus on the big picture rather than small details
Ask yourself questions about whether the content speaks to your bottom line
Look for flow and coherence
Double-check that the sources used are credible
Make sure there are CTAs
Once all of these boxes are checked, it’ll be much easier to wade through the content and allow your agency marketers to move along with the campaign.
As we discussed in our blog post, The Ultimate 2020 Website Strategy Playbook, it’s time to take a good look at what’s been working for your B2B brand and what might need some additional attention. You may have already done a website audit, gone over your budget for the upcoming year, and reassessed your SEO strategy. But we’re going to take a wild guess and assume it’s been a while since you’ve refreshed your value proposition. Don’t feel bad! That’s why we’re here. Let’s why you should take another look at this and how to do it.
What is a value proposition?
In simple terms, your brand’s value proposition is what entices customers into being interested in your product. It helps you align your marketing strategies to what gets your customers’ attention and what convinces them to seal the deal. Entrepreneur Daniel Nilsson points out that, on average, you have about seven seconds to make an excellent first impression with someone who’s looking into your business. So your B2B value proposition needs to be quick and snappy. That’s not to say that it’s a slogan or catchphrase, though. It needs to encompass both what your company does and how it serves your customers. Think of it more like the elevator pitch you use to describe yourself as a professional. Only about your business instead. At SmarkLabs, our value proposition is, “Driven by research, authentic content, and strategic marketing campaigns, we help tech-focused B2B companies accelerate revenue growth.”
Remember how bright-eyed and naive you were when you first started your business? Think about how much you’ve learned since then. You’ve learned more about your industry, you’ve learned through trial and error what works and what doesn’t, and you’ve learned more about what your customers are looking for when they come to you. While a company’s value proposition is usually determined early on, especially when you’re building the website, there’s no reason to be married to that value prop. Like most things when it comes to business, your value proposition is fluid. So you should reassess it periodically as you learn more about your customers, and as your B2B brand grows and evolves. In your early days, you probably didn’t have a clear idea of what your company was going to really do. Maybe potential customers come to your website and are still greeted with hyperbolic claims of you being the “best” in your industry. Don’t worry, though. That’s a common misstep that’s easy to remedy with a thoughtful new value proposition. Now you know, and you can relay that information to your potential customers.
How to determine your new value proposition
Exo B2B suggests starting by determining the value you bring to your customers’ problems, challenges, and objectives. Chances are, as your team has grown and learned its strengths, this is different than it was when you established your value proposition years ago. Luckily, we’ve gone over some tools you can use to help you with this in our blog post, 3 Tools to Help You Create a Strong B2B Value Proposition. But if you’re elaborating upon an old value proposition or creating a new one from scratch, think about the following questions to make sure you’re really speaking to what your company does now:
What sets you apart from other companies in your industry?
As you know, we’re huge advocates for collaboration between your sales and marketing teams. When it comes to developing your new value proposition, we have yet another reason to emphasize that importance. Many think of your value proposition as something that lives on your website. However, it should be a more significant part of your brand than that. Work together to create a value proposition that’s as effective when spoken by a sales rep as it is on your homepage.
Conversion rate optimization firm Invesp suggests testing your value proposition with an unbiased reader (or two, or three!) and asking them about the impression they got from it. Is that the message you want to send to potential customers? You can also run A/B tests on your homepage and see if one moves people along the website more than the other. The key to keeping a customer moving through your sales funnel is to make things simple and easily accessible. Start with having a good value proposition that speaks to what your company can do for them at this point. When a potential customer speaks with you or a sales representative or takes a look around your website, you want them to take away the most crucial points about your business and what it can do for them. Think about it; you have competitors. Your competitors have their own value propositions. Your competitors have that same seven seconds to get a potential client’s attention that you do. Make sure yours is good enough that they won’t even take the chance to look at anyone else.
There’s a lot of debate about whether sales enablement is the responsibility of the sales team or the marketing team. The truth is, it’s a concentrated effort between both. Marketing provides sales with the resources they need to make sales, like videos, blogs, and other types of content marketing. The sales team then passes this content along to potential customers to lead them through the sales funnel.
What is sales enablement?
HubSpot defines sales enablement as “the iterative process of providing your business’s sales team with the resources they need to close more deals.” The examples HubSpot gives includes content, tools, knowledge, and information to sell your product or service to customers effectively. Sales enablement doesn’t just consist of marketing assisting sales, though. It’s up to the sales team to relay any relevant information back to marketing about what kind of content works. Sales should also be able to offer up any information about what types of marketing materials are missing from their arsenal. This way, your company’s sales enablement strategy (and web content strategy) never stagnates. According to CoSchedule, sales enablement focuses on four core elements:
Sellers having access to the right content at the right time.
Improved collaboration between marketing and sales.
Ongoing training to help sales staff deliver on the bottom line.
Analytics to understand how content resonates with potential customers, then iterating on it for constant improvement.
Read on to learn more about how you can enhance your own B2B company’s sales enablement strategy.
What makes sales enablement effective?
According to LinkedIn, four things must align for your sales enablement strategy to be effective:
People: Your sales team has to understand, as well as have documented information on who the ideal client profiles are. Think about your buyer personas! Keep lines of communication open between the sales and marketing teams, ensuring that they’re collaborating. After all, you all have the same end goal. Sirius Decisions found that 19% more growth occurs when businesses align their marketing and sales departments.
Content:Your content is what your potential buyers see before they have any contact with your sales team. So you want to make sure that content makes them want to move forward in the process. We’ll touch on this more in-depth later on.
Technology:Segment your client profiles in your CRM, so your sales team can easily distinguish between them. According to HubSpot, 57% of high-performing sales reps say that technology is their top sales enablement priority. Specifically, “deployment of and training on new technology was closely followed by improving rep usage of social media, and restructuring or creating enablement function.”
Process:Be sure there’s a documented process for what approaches you use during the prospecting process and how often. Continuously reexamine what’s working and what isn’t. Then keep that information in your CRM, accessible to both teams.
Sales enablement for marketers
Many people struggle to determine who “owns” sales enablement. Spoiler alert: nobody does. The entire concept of sales enablement revolves around the collaboration between teams. Sales enablement doesn’t solely fall on the shoulders of the company’s marketers. But, it does mean something a little different than it does for your sales team. In many ways, it’s up to a company’s marketers to even get leads interested in talking to sales. According to the market research firm, Forrester, 60% of B2B buyers get most of their information from sources other than sales reps. You want your marketing materials to be those sources, and you want them to be good enough that they lead buyers to your sales reps. It’s also a common pain point when the marketing team has loads of useful content that would benefit potential customers, but the sales team just doesn’t know that it exists. Or even where to find it! It seems like a simple enough issue to avoid, but we’re all aware of how bulky and messy workflows can get when they aren’t maintained. Take extra precautions, and keep all of your finished content in a place that each team can easily find.
The types of tasks that land on the marketing team to smooth this rocky road include being proactive and using content mapping, providing a smooth transition between the groups, and sharing customer insights. Which brings us to our next point.
Keep an eye on competitive and market insights
Marketers have inside knowledge of the customer’s buying journey before the buyers even get around to speaking to sales. Use that to your advantage and relay that information to sales! This way, your sales team can directly address the things you all know are on your customers’ minds. What content you’ve created has done well? What pages on your site get the most traffic? If any of your content is lagging, what can you do to make your message clearer and better answer your potential buyers’ questions? Not only can this information aid in the sales enablement process, but it can also help you polish your website strategy.
Don’t minimize the importance of automation
Could everything in your sales strategy be done by hand? Sure, I guess. But why would you take on that burden when there are so many automation tools at your disposal? You don’t want to get bogged down with tedious tasks. HubSpot recommends automating the following:
Email sequences: An email sequence is a follow-up email automatically triggered when a prospect hasn’t responded within a certain amount of time. They’re completely customizable, from the timeframe that passes before the email sends, to specific details included in the email.
Prospecting:Why go through the hassle of setting up call times with each prospect when you can let them come to you? In your follow up emails, include a link to your calendar that allows them to schedule time with you. You’ll have a full calendar of qualified leads, without having to lift a finger!
Direct messaging:Chatbots are nothing new. How you can use them in your sales enablement strategy is. Add filtering criteria to the chatbot on your website, so only quality leads are matched up with sales reps.
You can automate many of these things with sales enablement software, such as HubSpot, Outreach, or Zendesk.
Pay attention to your sales content
Whether we’re talking slide decks, presentations, proposals, or your collateral, all of your sales content needs to be great. And it needs to be used. It might sound silly to have to point this out. However, multiple studies have found that an alarming amount of marketing content is produced and perfected, only for it never to see the light of day. The Content Marketing Institute recently reported that up to 80% of the content provided by marketing teams goes unused. There could be several reasons as to why this happens. Perhaps the content produced is outdated or doesn’t answer the questions prospective buyers have. If that’s the case, that information must be relayed back to the marketing team so that they can re-examine their strategy. This takes us back, once again, to ensure that both sides have open lines of communication and have easy access to these materials. However, if you’ve taken these precautions and truly find that the content you’re working on ends up being busywork that doesn’t contribute to your bottom line, focus your energy on other aspects of the sales enablement process.
Demand generation is what a brand does to create awareness and interest. Making the public conscious of their business is a key factor in leading them to want to learn more. It’s any marketing effort your B2B company makes to bring people into your sales funnel, with an emphasis on personalization. As mentioned in our blog post, “The Impact of Demand Generation on Sales Cycles,” the B2C world can use demand generation in areas with longer sales cycles, but it’s most common in the B2B world. B2B products and services aren’t typically purchased impulsively, so commercials and traditional ad strategies don’t always work in such niche markets. So think outside the box when it comes to your demand gen strategies. Try using tools like search engine advertising, SEO, webinars, and free trials. According to the SaaS platform, Integrate, demand generation “supports the entire marketing and sales cycle, from initial prospect interest and lead generation to lead nurturing and sales enablement to first sale and cross-sell.”
Isn’t that just lead generation?
Well, no. But I can see why you’d think so. The best way to describe the relationship between lead and demand generation is that the two strategies overlap. Like lead gen, demand generation is a crucial part of the sales cycle, but the two are not the same. Unlike lead generation, demand gen in and of itself doesn’t involve a deal or a follow-up. Demand gen is what a brand does to create awareness and interest. Lead gen is more like the “how” part of the equation. Now that consumers know what you are, how are you going to make that interest work for you?
How demand generation ties to inbound marketing
In addition to confusing demand generation for lead generation, many people mix it up with inbound marketing. While an effective demand gen strategy will certainly use inbound marketing strategies (and outbound ones, too), it’s far too simplistic to consider them the same. Part of the reason demand generation is confused for so many other aspects of the marketing and sales processes is that it’s not so tangible. There isn’t a set “demand generation” spot on the sales funnel. In many cases, your demand gen efforts are starting to take place before a customer even enters the buying journey. HubSpot refers to demand gen programs as touchpoints throughout the conversion optimization and sales cycles. You could say that it’s present throughout the entire funnel.
All about the content
Creating content is the most common method of demand gen. Most of the time, that content is answering questions that consumers may have, or attempting to solve a problem. Online content like blogs, whitepapers, and videos that are search engine optimized help increase your chances that people who can use your services will find what you have to offer. Demand generation can also be highly interactive. Webinars and event marketing are increasingly popular ways to bring awareness to your brand while engaging directly with consumers. In such a short time, social media has also become a crucial method of demand generation. Gone are the days of boring, bland corporate presences on social platforms. Brands are taking the opportunity of free publicity that social media gives them by creating new, approachable profiles that allow consumers to see them as more than a brand. Having an ongoing presence that keeps potential buyers (and even people who have already purchased) coming back allows you to nurture relationships long term.
The need for relevance
Demand gen is thoughtful and engaging. Cold emails and banner ads certainly have their place in the marketing and sales worlds, but they do not fall under the demand generation umbrella. That’s not to say that you have to completely write marketing automation out of your demand gen strategy, though. Founder of Seas Marketing, Kari Seas, told Marketingland that the right marketing automation platform will still allow you to establish those deep relationships with your leads and make it simpler to have an ongoing conversation with them. The whole purpose of your demand gen strategy is that it creates interest around your brand. That requires your efforts to be relevant to your consumers. Targeting individual customers at specific points in their buyer’s journey is imperative. Allowing your sales and marketing teams to work together on this strategy really helps ensure you’re contacting each lead at the right time. You don’t want your efforts to be wasted on hard-selling a casual browser or have someone who was looking to make a purchase slip through the cracks.
It should be data-driven
All marketers know that data is everything when it comes to refining your process. There’s nothing like cold, hard numbers to let you know if your marketing efforts are driving the progress and revenue you’re aiming for. So why should your sales and marketing teams have to each find out those numbers for themselves? Let’s continue the discussion of how important it is for the sales and marketing teams to work together. Wordstream states that demand generation is a “long-term relationship between a brand’s marketing and sales teams, and prospective customers.” When both teams work closely, they’re able to share pertinent information about potential leads with each other. This allows each lead to be nurtured appropriately. When the marketing team creates content and evaluates its performance, they’re able to relay that information. Doing so allows your sales team to determine which leads are ready to take the leap and which ones need a little more nurturing. Sure, in theory, each of these teams can take on these tasks themselves. But why not combine your efforts and spend that saved time moving your leads through the sales funnel? You know what they say: work smarker, not harder. (Oops, did we mean “smarter?”)
Why it matters
Integrate pointed out that even though you can have lead generation without demand generation, you shouldn’t. Including both strategies into your marketing efforts will help you attract more quality leads and engage potential leads to the point of becoming sales-ready. “Using wider demand generation tactics typically leads to more intelligent lead generation efforts due to a deeper understanding of bottom-funnel performance,” Integrate also stated. “By closing the loop on marketing performance, demand marketers can fine-tune their lead generation efforts to capture more qualified opportunities. With better brand authority and customer trust, they may increase their visitor-to-lead conversion rates.” Simply put, demand generation streamlines and refines your marketing strategy, ensuring your market qualified leads are nurtured at the right time (and your other leads are on their way to becoming MQLs!). As a marketer, it saves you time and minimizes the guesswork, allowing you to target effectively. What could be more important than that?
