Posts in B2B Marketing

What could happen if you united content, advertising, media, consumer engagement and consumer insight with an interdisciplinary content marketing strategy? We found out when Julie Fleischer, Director, Data + Content + Media at Kraft Foods delivered her opening keynote remarks earlier this month, The ROI on Content: How Kraft Learned the True Value of Their Content and Rebuilt Their Marketing Around It at Content Marketing World 2014. She shared how Kraft rebuilt marketing around content and transformed how they go to market. Kraft’s content is garnering four times better ROI than paid advertising and is capturing the equivalent of 1.1 billion annual ad impressions. (more…)

Many marketers feel that their industry calls for them to write on topics that won’t easily engage potential customers and index with the search engines. It’s an endless challenge for content marketers in B2B markets to present content in entertaining or engaging ways. But there are some good ways to create interesting content in any industry. Perhaps your industry isn’t what’s boring! (more…)

Some time ago, I took two of my young grandsons to a West Michigan Whitecaps baseball game. The Whitecaps are the Class A farm team for the Detroit Tigers that play ball in my hometown, Grand Rapids. Like many of the minor league venues, the ball game is just part of the entertainment experience. It’s fun. There’s funky food (like a “dietary disaster” 4800 calorie Frito burger—I’m not kidding), contests, door prizes, promotions, and the gamut of seating options—lawn, box, reserved, corporate suites and party decks for hosting private events. That’s where the brand ambassador comes in for Batteries Plus. (more…)

There are many ways for marketers to participate in today’s visual culture. Images have power, even when they are just a vehicle for text. We hope these 10 B2B marketing quotes from a few of the industry’s top experts will brighten your day and inspire you with new ways to establish your brand as a leader in your industry. (more…)

We live in visual culture. This is difficult to overstate. Consider a statistic taken from a recent Jeff Bullas blog post. Get this: “Ten percent of photos taken in human history took place in the last 12 months.” Think about that. At first it sounds insane, but it’s not hard to believe when you consider that 208,300 photos are posted to Facebook every minute (statistic taken from a recent Content Marketing Institute webinar). Almost everyone walks around with a camera in his or her pocket. We’re very attached to images, and if you look around, you start to see just how attached. (more…)

Rise Above the Heavy Volume of Content by Adding Value

My inbox is full, and I’m willing to bet yours is too. For a while now the content marketing floodgates have been open. But customers, prospects, followers, and friends are opening their browsers and emails and realizing they’re done with “more”. We’re swamped. Newsjacking is an accepted practice because marketers are challenged to generate content with reasonable frequency, so customers see the same repurposed content over and over. The challenge to create more content sometimes overshadows the need for valuable content. It comes down to the classic idiom: quality over quantity. (more…)

It was an interesting online presentation last week—a webinar on webinars. I attended Content Marketing Institute’s (CMI) “The Webinar Benchmark Throwdown, You vs. Your Industry Peers.” CMI Founder Joe Pulizzi moderated and Mark Bornstein, Sr. Director of Content Marketing at ON24, spoke at the hour-long interactive presentation that included quiz questions throughout the webinar to test attendees “webinar smarts.” The session centered on results from ON24’s Annual Webinar Benchmark Report 2013, a pretty extensive study of webinar utilization and performance metrics. I hadn’t read the report prior to the webinar, and I’ll give myself a B+ for correctly answering most of the multiple-choice quiz questions—based solely on my personal webinar attendance experience and behaviors. (more…)

Met with Barry a few months ago, a prospective vendor from a Milwaukee-area based company. Actually, it’s the third time in the past couple years he’s made a point to call a week ahead and asked for 15 or 20 minutes of my time. He swung by the office for a few minutes of face time to show me some of their latest B2B work that might have relevance to our clients’ needs—with a promise to be respectful of my time. I’ve never actually bought anything—as in awarded a project to him. Yet. But when the right one comes along, he’ll definitely get a shot.

There are at least a dozen local companies and probably more, that provide the same type of business services in our local market, Grand Rapids. Most of them are no more than 15 to 20 minutes away from our office, and yet most I’ve never actually met in person and none have ever actually paid a visit. Even when we’ve put a couple projects out for local bids, communication has been entirely by email and phone—with suggestions that I look at their work on their websites. (News flash. I already did. Before you ever knew I was looking. It’s why you got a call from us in the first place.) (more…)

Perhaps you’ve already watched this video about the Ghirardi Compton Oak. It made the rounds on the Internet a while ago. I think it makes a powerful B2B testimonial—for CAT Heavy Equipment and the Hess Landscaping Company. But that’s not what it’s really about. This simple but moving (pun intended) video on the City of League, Texas YouTube Channel documents the relocation and preservation of an iconic century-old oak tree. The massive 518,000 lb., 56 ft. tall tree was moved more than a quarter of a mile to make way for a road-widening project. It’s pretty cool. Yes, I suppose you could give Madison Ave. a million bucks and they’d polish it up—make it slick. But I’m not so sure they‘d do any better capturing the genuine authenticity and credibility that this video does with a few stills, some video clips, graphic titles, a stock music track and, most importantly, a great story to tell (and they did without an announcer).

What I love about this video (besides the story) is what it tells us—and B2B marketers about online video and what you do and don’t need to create good, compelling video content for online presentation today. (more…)

The velocity with which B2B marketing has evolved over the past two years (let alone five years) is amazing. Frankly, it’s a challenge to keep up with it at times. I’m particularly grateful to all those who take the time to share their knowledge to help others. Here are more than 30 of my favorite B2B search-related posts over the last year, posts that either focus directly on search or on the issues that strongly impact search (e.g., content).

While I’ve tried to bookmark this content throughout the year, I’m sure I’ve missed some really good posts and other resources. Please add to this list via the comments. (more…)