What are the traits that make the best B2B Marketers today

In today’s competitive market, simply having outstanding content is just half the job done. As a new-age marketer in the Digital B2B marketing industry, there’s a lot that goes into the making of a thought leader. Let us explore some of the traits that go beyond the known facts of good content and social media marketing genius.

Subject matter expertise-

Becoming a subject matter expert is the first step to becoming a thought leader. Writing a compelling piece of content is not always a piece of cake.  Writing about complex products, services even and technology can take some level of expertise that comes through years of study, perseverance and also through contributing your own thoughts to add value to business and the market. As a successful B2B marketer, you would want to prep-up on the knowledge front that will surely create a loyal audience for you.

Be an awesome storyteller-

In the realm of B2B Digital Marketing realm, being an awesome story-teller is a skill not many possess. Great story-telling equals to creating great content and can surely get more audience for your business and can keep them engaged for long. Cutting through the content noise in the market and standing out in the crowd is an art and you can accomplish it through intelligent, insightful storytelling

Being Tech-savvy-

In a high-tech and hyper connected world in B2B Digital Marketing industry, staying updated when it comes to technology has almost become a must. Going beyond apps and getting to know about technology tools that can help leverage your business, can surely pave way toward becoming the best B2B marketer today.

Defining the right goals and objectives and configuring your expertise around it; while learning each day can help you become a thought leader that everyone wants to listen to.

Things to remember when you do inbound marketing for a B2B company

Traditional outbound marketing was becoming too noisy for customers to believe the authenticity that it claimed. Inbound marketing strategies mostly work for all companies and more so for B2B companies. Following certain rules for creating and implementing inbound marketing strategies can change the face of your business.

So, what should you plan when it comes to inbound marketing for B2B companies? Here are a few steps-

With clear and thoughtful messaging, inbound marketing can help B2B companies gain visibility and make their presence felt. Identifying the right audience can help give the right direction to all the efforts. Inbound marketing helps enhance your social media presence too. Bringing quality leads can be a challenge; however, unique inbound marketing helps ease the challenges to bring in a lot of quality leads from time to time.

Being more focused and adopting more direct ways, helps B2B companies make sure that their products and services reach the right audiences and are made easily available to customers. Content is a factor that these companies heavily rely on and make it strategic and also unique for fetching better results. Creating informative, shareable content is a good inbound marketing strategy that works for almost all industries today.  In addition to meaningful content, the use of SEO, meaningful call-to-action, emailers that are crafted with the right messaging for the right audience can create outstanding results.

Inbound marketing calls for designing and planning campaigns that are customized for a specific audience and the content and the context both play an important role while implementing inbound marketing. Apart from creating the right content, the distribution of messages across various social media channels also matters and affects the results.

The objective of any marketing strategy is always to attract new prospects and convert them into customers; however in inbound marketing, a part of the objective is also to elevate the overall customer experience. Hence, creating a buyer persona is critical in any B2B industry.

So here’s the crux of what you should do to plan a good inbound marketing strategy-

•  Create informative and engaging content
•   Understand and create buyer personas
•   Focus on elevating customer experience
•   Buyer’s journey is important in planning the strategy
•   Evaluate the results and re-strategize

Creating an outstanding and competent inbound marketing strategy requires skills, so make sure that you hire resources that have the experience, knowledge and the clarity that is required to keep up with the competition.

Unique ways to add more value to content in a B2B landscape

When you have taken up the role to write content on a regular basis, whether it is for an organization or for yourself, think of how you can get innovative and how far you can really go when it comes to dishing out not just words but some creative, out-of-the-box ideas.  Usually, when you are busy churning out content on a daily basis; it’s sometimes good to take a pause and step back a little and ask yourself a few questions. The answers might startle you and you might want to think of new ways to look at content for better results.

Curating Content-

In a B2B Digital Marketing industry or any other industry, for that matter; curating content may not be an inspiring task for any writer who wants to invest all his energy into writing original content. But curating can require skills and it in no way means that you re re-using content. If curating someone else’s content can add more value to it then why not try it to see how it works for you. With plenty of resources available, it takes some level of skill to reinvent ways of finding new content, analyzing it to see if it suits your business domain and to reposition it for making it sharable enough.

Critical thinking-

Critically looking at content resources may not be such a negative trait. In fact, to be able to question anything that does not convince you or having the curiosity to dig-deeper for finding more insights through any content piece is a good sign of being a competitive content writer. Not accepting content at its face value, or trying to find the underlying message that you may want to build upon, can help create some unique content pieces for the right audiences.

Understanding the audience-

Like it or not, no matter how creative you want to be, you may not have the free will to write about any theme, without understanding your audience and taking their preferences into account. In the B2B Digital Marketing realm; understanding your audience and their needs should be at the core of all your strategies; let alone content. In fact, your audiences and their needs may give you a direction to create content effectively; as without a goal your content may not become that valuable or shareable.

The role of a content writer can be creative and challenging enough, with the perks of being able to switch roles between a researcher, a curator and even a problem-solver. If you write content as though you are solving a problem and making someone’s life easy; there won’t be a dearth of ideas for creating valuable content.

E-mailers- a powerful tool to keep your readers engaged!

E-mailers are at the heart of every digital marketing service. Creating outstanding e-mailers with excellent content and messaging can do wonders to help you attract prospects, engage them and fetch huge ROI.

It isn’t difficult to find the companies who offer email marketing services; however it is a challenge to find the ones, who create out-of-the-box e-mailers that can change the face of your business with their unique content and messaging.

Here are a few things that good e-mailers can do for your business-

Building brand credibility-

Email marketing is like a direct reflection of your brand values. A good e-mailer with excellent messaging can help build your brand credibility and thus enhance your reach.

Enhancing website traffic-

A good, attractive e-mailer that is built with a purpose can be a direct gateway to your website. An e-mailer can be your first impression for prospects to dig deeper and log into your website to know more.

Establishing long term relationships-

An excellently crafted e-mailer is not just a page of information. It can be a powerful tool for you to not just attract a one-time prospect; it is a tool that can help you build relationships and keep enhancing them every time you send them some interesting data that is relevant and engaging.

Making Recommendations-

Establishing long-term relationships is all about intent and about nurturing those relationships. A good response and long list of followers is a good measure of success when it comes to e-mail marketing. You may simply care to know the customers’ preferences, likes and dislike, build offers around it and make recommendations too. After all, people won’t follow you for nothing!

Creating personalized messaging-

Similar to making recommendations, e-mailer marketing services that create e-mailers with focused, personalized messaging, almost always never go unnoticed. It is the effort that attracts customers and helps build trust.

Offering free resources-

E-mailers that offer free resources or links can attract customers who become your instant followers. Content that can be shared and used is valuable content!

Thus, e-mailers have a huge potential to attract prospects and convert them into customers. However, the key is to know the purpose, the audience and build content around these parameters for better results.

For effective B2B Inbound marketing – Attract, Engage and Delight!

B2B marketing landscape has drastically changed over the past few years. With digitization and technology at the forefront of revolutionizing the entire customer experience; marketers are re-thinking their approach toward attracting prospects, engaging them and eventually establishing a long-lasting relationship with the ‘happy customer’.

If you look at the buying journey of your customer, it should look like an incredibly engaging transition from an intrigued prospect to a happy customer; one that is built around trust, momentum and sustainability. A smart B2B inbound marketing strategy can do just that! It is more like a journey, built around innovative approaches and practices to create invaluable customer experience with a long-lasting, positive effect on businesses.

Inbound marketing is all about raising brand awareness, adding value to businesses, unlike the hard-sell approach. It therefore promises a more sustainable marketing business model that can win you loyal customers.

So what does inbound marketing look like?

Attract (Pull in prospects through without the hard-sell approach)

Engage (Empathetic conversations)

Delight (Creating lasting customer relationships through a consultative approach)

The Inbound methodology that works-

Curate what and whom you want to attract-
You want to attract only those prospects that are most likely to get converted into potential leads and eventually happy customers. You can do this by identifying buyer-personas and creating relevant content, publishing it around the right channels at the right time and analyzing the results and re-strategizing your content. You can attract them through blogs, videos, emails, ads and social media.

Engage to create lasting relationships-
More human interaction with an empathetic touch can create more possibilities of engaging your prospects. You can do this through engaging and relevant conversations created through chats, e-mails, ads, etc. Engage them through a creative confluence of technology and content strategy by using conversational bots, emailer marketing, lead management and many more tools.

Delight with trust and credibility-
For more delightful customer experience, make sure you deliver the right information to the right customer, at the right time. It’s all about surprising them with engaging content through innovative tools such as videos, infographics and more. Smart content, emailers, and marketing automation tools can help you delight your customers throughout the buyer journey.

The whole definition of customer experience in the past decade has changed drastically. Inbound marketing therefore fits in right, with a more strategic and persona-based approach. Giving away the right information through innovative content is one of the most important ingredients of a successful inbound marketing strategy.

For effective B2B inbound marketing, pinning the wheel of inbound marketing tools around rich and shareable content is the key to attracting the right prospects, engaging them effectively and delighting them in the longer run.