01 Mar 2016

20 Marketers & Founders Share Their Best B2B Marketing Strategy

20 Marketers & Founders Share Their Best B2B Marketing Strategy

What is your best B2B Marketing strategy that works virtually every time and why?

This is a great question that the experts can answer. Popular marketers and founders who have been there and done it. Men and women who live and breathe business and marketing. That’s why we browsed the web and looked for answers, from the right people.

To make a long story short, we got some of the most known marketers and founders to answer an important question for us.

“What is your best B2B Marketing strategy that works virtually every time and WHY?”

The answers we received are pure gold.

Enjoy these insights and make sure to read the last expert’s answer.

Let’s get right into it!

Matthew_Barby[1]Matthew Barby

MatthewBarby.com // @Twitter

~ Global Head of Growth & SEO @HubSpot, award winning blogger, global speaker and lecturer ~

It’s difficult to suggest a marketing strategy that works every time because that very rarely happens. That said, the playbook that we use at HubSpot is one that scales well within most B2B campaigns.

It all revolves around educating your end customer in order to build yourself up to becoming a thought leader within your field.

This kind of trust-building takes time and resources to execute effectively, but once you’ve established yourself in your market you’ll reap the rewards.

In the early stages, focus your content production efforts towards gaining exposure in industry publications.

Back this up with related content across your own website, keeping it all tied into your social media strategy, and ensure that you have a solid lead funnel in place to capture contact information from your readers.

Once you have this, nurture them over a period of time until they’re ready to buy from you – then all you have to do is be there for them with your product/service.

Neil_Patel[1]Neil Patel

NeilPatel.com // @Twitter

~ Entrepreneur, investor & influencer. Columnist for Forbes, Inc, Entrepreneur, Huffington Post & more. Founded KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg, QuickSprout & Hellobar ~

Content marketing. If you look at KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg and even Quick Sprout you’ll notice that I’ve grown each of my B2B companies through content marketing.

It works really well. So well that blogs like the KISSmetrics one gets around a million visitors a month.

Once you generate the traffic you’ll have to collect leads and try to convert those visitors into webinar registrations (or demo requests), but eventually a percentage of those blog visitors will turn into customers.

The percentage won’t be high, but because you can generate thousands of visitors a month, it shouldn’t be hard to make it up in quantity.

In addition to that if you compare content marketing with paid advertising, you’ll find that content marketing is a much more cost effective strategy.

I’ve also tested this out with service based businesses and it works too.

Justin_Brooke[1]Justin Brooke

IMScalable.com // @Twitter

~ Ad man, blogger, father, gamer, wannabe a poet/coder/skateboarder/samurai ~

Writing a detailed case study about how a specific result was achieved. Then ending with how we can help them do the same.

You may want to read these…

What I Learned From A Million Dollar Per Month Campaign

How To Get 60,000 Leads Per Month With TOFU, MOFU, & BOFU?

Alok_Vasudeva[1]Alok Vasudeva

AlokVasudeva.com // @Twitter

~ Principal and founder, The Marketer’s Continuum | B2B marketer | Contributing author | Co-chair, SCIP Silicon Valley ~

When BestExpertRoundups.com reached out to me with the question, “What is your best B2B Marketing strategy that works virtually every time and WHY?” I needed to pause and ask the site’s founder, Codrut Trucanu, “Well, how did you find me?”

His answer: “Through Twitter.”

From that statement, you might think that my answer would be “social media.” It’s not. Twitter is just a social medium that amplifies the effect of existing information.

Actually, it’s the “intelligent content” embedded within my Twitter profile that compelled Codrut to “follow” and ultimately reach out to me. It’s imperative that content be a part of everyone’s B2B marketing strategy.

Perhaps it would make sense for me to illustrate why it’s necessary to create content. Here it is in a succinct, bulleted fashion:

  • It brings change.
  • It improves closing.
  • It establishes clout.
  • It facilitates communication.
  • It elicits confidence.
  • It creates connection.
  • It yields consumption.
  • It grants contact.
  • It inspires conversation.
  • It improves conversion.
  • It provides credibility.

I’m going to give you three examples of content that has helped move the sales cycle forward:

Conversation – In 2013, I assisted one of my mentors in writing a book on the subject of content marketing.

When it came time to ask for a public recommendation in advance of the book’s publication, I solicited my network and received quite a bit of interest.

One interested individual was the head of the Silicon Valley chapter of the Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals.

I asked her if she could write a recommendation for the book, and she subsequently asked me if I would like to become a part of her group’s steering committee. “Sure,” I said. Then, when she stepped down later that year, I was nominated co-chair of the group.

The book, being my “one-pound business card,” provided a vehicle for a conversation and ultimately increased my credibility.

Confidence – Nina Mufleh created a microsite highlighting Airbnb’s unpenetrated market in the Middle East and the potential opportunities.

When she distributed her findings on Twitter, Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky responded by tweeting, “I am reviewing right now. Very impressive :).”

Dropbox, LinkedIn, and Uber also reached out to her based on the publicity of her campaign, and due to all of the PR activity, she received more than 2,000 emails from around the world from people who had viewed her resume.

Through her grassroots efforts and innovative calling card, Mufleh was eventually offered a position at talent marketplace provider Upwork as a freelance growth manager.

Contact – Dennis Shiao, DNN’s director of content marketing, mentioned that “A Buyer’s Guide to Web CMS” has moved many prospects along the buyer’s journey, leading to several closed/won deals.

It is important to note, however, that since this high-value piece of content requires user registration, it leads to the initial establishment of contact early on in the buyer’s journey.

“Gated” content, which requires users to register on a website’s contact form, gives the company access to prospects’ contact information, including their email addresses.

With so much of the marketing budget spent on highly popularized marketing automation tools, it’s important to realize that these tools alone would provide no value if it weren’t for content.

Marketing automation is the gun, and content is the ammunition – and without intelligent content, you are simply using blanks. Content, therefore, should be at the forefront of all B2B marketing strategies.

Dave_Rigotti[1]Dave Rigotti

DaveRigotti.com //@Twitter

~ Head of marketing at @Bizible B2B marketing attribution. Past: @Microsoft ~

Focus on revenue. By doing this, you optimize for the outcome of your marketing, not marketing itself. It’s called pipeline marketing.

A good example of this is cost-per-lead. A lot of B2B marketers will optimize their marketing, especially media, for this metric. However, it doesn’t take into account any conversion rates post lead.

Just because a lead was cheaper, doesn’t mean it was the right decisions to make, especially if it converts to revenue at a much lower rate.

To measure for revenue, marketers need to deeply understand their attribution setup and model. The State of Pipeline Marketing report found that 25% of B2B marketers don’t have an attribution model.

Not much better, 55% are using a single touch model which was designed for B2C and ineffective for B2B given the sales cycle and multiple decision makers often involved in deals.

Once you deeply understand your attribution and fill any data gaps that might exist, you can optimize for revenue which improves growth, aligns marketing with sales, and removes a lot of subjectivity from decisions.

Jay_Baer[1]Jay Baer

JayBaer.com // @Twitter

~ The most re-tweeted person in the world among digital marketers. Author, speaker, podcaster, investor. President of @Convince. ~

Slideshare, done well.

Read

SlideShare is the digital marketing secret weapon – new research

And…

5 Lessons from 1 Million Views on SlideShare

Peter_Cohen[1]Peter Cohen

SaasMarketingStrategy.com //@Twitter

~ Managing Partner, SaaS Marketing Strategy Advisors, Inc. ~

Sorry for the bad news, but B2B marketers can’t rely on a single tactic.  Like clothing or music, marketing tactics come in and out of style.

What works today might not work tomorrow, and what works for somebody else’s market might not work for yours.

Besides, when you’re marketing B2B solutions, you’ll probably need to connect with your prospects through several different tactics over the course of the purchase process.

The companies I’ve worked with typically use a combination of online tactics like email newsletters, webinars, paid search, and compelling web content, plus they’ll add in more traditional tactics like events and PR.

There are even times when a direct mail piece printed and sent through snail mail makes sense.

Instead of looking for the “magic bullet,” try different tactics, measure their impact, and constantly make adjustments.  And by the way, don’t just measure views, likes, or downloads.  It’s paying customers that you’re after.

By the way, though you’re constantly tinkering with your marketing tactics, your value proposition and messages should stay fairly consistent.  Your target audience should have no doubt about what you sell and why they should buy it.

But the tactics you use to deliver those messages… well that’s a moving target.  Just when you think you’ve hit on the perfect mix, things will change.

Paul_Gillin[1]Paul Gillin

Gillin.com // @Twitter

~ Speaker, B2B strategist, @Profitecture trainer, author of five social media books ~

Enlisting subject matter experts (SMEs) as regular contributors to a company blog is the closest a B2B marketer can come to lead-gen nirvana.

SMEs have instant credibility with customers and they can engage in the deep conversations that their most knowledgeable customers prize.

They also speak the language of their customers, which resonates more deeply with the market than content prepared by a generalist. It also kills on search engine performance.

The best example of SME blogging I’ve ever seen is Indium Corp., a maker of industrial fusible metals.

There are, at best, only a couple of thousand people in the world who are prospects for the company’s products, but they buy by the truckload.

There are no trade publications, no lists and no trade shows where these people congregate. You have to get them to find you.

Indium created a constellation of more than 70 blogs written by 30 bloggers, most of them engineers. They made sure to use the keywords that customers use when seeking advice.

Then they offered to connect their experts with prospects to solve problems.

Within six months, leads exploded 600% with better quality than they had ever seen. Today Indium dominates Google search results for nearly every keyword set that matters to them.

I also like the example of Emerson Process Experts, a blog hosted by Emerson Process Management and written by engineer-turned-communicator Jim Cahill. Jim’s been at it for 10 years, and any blogger would envy his traffic.

More importantly, the blog has brought numerous business opportunities into Emerson, including an invitation to bid on a multi-hundred-million-dollar contract.

“I have the e-mail from that company on my wall next to a sign that asks ‘Is there any value in blogging?’” Cahill laughs.

Pierre_Lechelle[1]Pierre Lechelle

PierreLechelle.com //@Twitter

~ SaaS B2B Growth Marketer ~

What most people get wrong about Digital Marketing is the Sales Process. They expect visitors to convert straight away to their core offer. They expect people to come to their website and purchase immediately.

What generally happens is very different.

People want to get to know you. They want to experience your brand and consume content before they financially commit to your offerings.

How can you better cater for these people? The simple answer to that question is by designing a Sales Process that can nurture these people and warm them up over time.

Here is an example of a “good” sales process for an accounting software:

People will discover your website through an article saying “How to better understand VAT for your European clients”

They now believe that you’ve interesting things to say and can help them make more money so they subscribe for your newsletter.

Few weeks later, they notice that you just wrote an eBook about “Better Accounting for SaaS Businesses”.

Since it’s a meaty piece, they save it and come back to it a month later.

They receive loads of content from you and take incredible learnings out of them.

They come back to your eBook and they discover that you sell an accounting software especially tailored for SaaS Businesses.

They sign up for a Free Trial and start using your software.

30 days later, they’re a customer!

See the trick here? You didn’t try to make the sale on the first day. You brought plenty of interesting information.

The day they’ll be looking for such a software, you’ll be the first choice.

Don’t copy and paste the process explained above. Design your own Sales & Marketing funnel to make your business more efficient.

Design a V1 and then iteratively experiment in order to optimize your results and generate more revenue.

Kathryn_Tito_Dunlay[1]Kathryn Tito Dunlay

NewEnglandB2bMarketing.com //@Twitter

~ President of New England Sales & Marketing: B2B Lead Generation Social Media Lead Gen & Training | Telemarketing | Email | Digital Marketing ~

Let’s assume for the sake of this discussion that the marketing strategy we’re talking about has a goal of lead generation.

Bottom line, it’s critical that each B2B company “test before they invest” in marketing strategies.

There is no one best strategy that works virtually every time – for every company. However, via campaign tests companies will find their more reliable, predictable marketing strategy.

I would suggest that the “one” strategy that works consistently is actually “Multi-Channel Outreach”. Why? Because today’s valued B2B prospects are typically inundated with lackluster vendor outreach.

The best way to differentiate yourself and “get into their head” is to manage a campaign with specific messaging and send out your messaging across multiple channels including, but not limited to email, social media, and phone.

An important factor is to change up the message format based on what works best for each platform, don’t simply repeat the same message via voicemail, LinkedIn, and email.

Crucially, be sure to emphasize why you are reaching out to them in particular, and detail exactly how you can make their professional life more successful.

These two components alone separate the high-conversion messages from sales spam.

Alternatively marketers can test each platform separately, or in combinations. For example, I generally see that email and telemarketing used in concert increases response rates.

The same applies to telemarketing and social media. Ultimately, telemarketing seems to drive the conversion home. However, when used alone, not so much.

Finally, it’s key to include bullet proof content in your outreach.

Be ready to relay informal anecdotes about clients you’ve helped. Even better if you have case studies and videos that you can use and re-use in your multi-channel outreach.

Case study #1: The value of synching up social selling and telemarketing.

When used alone, my client was seeing a .5% conversion to leads from telemarketing. We reconfigured the campaign to include social outreach and made adjustments to the telemarketing.

By the end of the campaign, we had a 17% total response rate and 7.5% of those converted to appointments to learn more.

Case study #2: The one-two impact of telemarketing and email

Telemarketing was proving frustrating as my client was struggling to get through to prospects via phone. They literally had a fraction of a percent response rate and no conversions.

Upon adding email and conducting social research to find the most relevant contacts, the response rate went up to 3%, with prospects emailing back that they would like to talk.

Sean_Campbell[1]Sean Campbell

CascadeInsights.com // @Twitter

~ CEO – Tech Sector Research Firm, Host – B2B Market Research podcast, and long suffering Cubs fan~

The Best B2B Marketing strategy is to focus on what drives a sales conversation forward and work backwards from there.

Build your campaigns around the questions your clients have and the resistance they have to change.

Then educate potential customers on how to answer those specific issues and provide them strategies to surmount the opposition they face inside their organizations – when it comes to responding to these questions.

At that point, you’ll have the right foundation for your B2B Marketing strategy.

For example, we base many of our podcast episodes off of the questions that clients ask during the sales cycle.

In fact, our content calendar is partially built upon the questions clients and potential clients raise about the research process, B2B market dynamics, or the tech sector.

Because if one client has a question, and then you hear the same question five times in the same week, well you can bet that’s going to make a great podcast episode or a piece of content marketing.

In sum, too many B2B marketers try to “guess” what potential clients want to see in the marketing they are about to produce. As opposed to just “riding along” during sales calls or by conducting meaningful and actionable research on target buyers.”

Shawn_Collins[1]Shawn Collins

AffiliateTip.com // @Twitter

~ Affiliate marketer, runner, Yankees & Jets fan, Maryland Terp, working on the next great American novel ~

Direct mail, because none of your competitors are doing it.

Rob_Anderson[1]Rob Anderson

Inkster.com // @Twitter

~ Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer at @_inkster_ Artist. Musician. Photographer. Entrepreneur. Visionary ~

In my experience, whether you’re connecting with clients, customers, partners or other businesses- if you want to build that relationship, it’s all about getting to know them.

Qualifying your leads ahead of time will save you a lot of headaches and disappointments down the road.

Know who you’re after and why. Find the decision makers. Learn about the people around them. Get to know them too. Provide genuine value to your customers.

Take interest in who they are as people. Help them get what they want and they’ll help you get what you want.

Go above and beyond. Read a book like Dale Carnegie’s “Think and Grow Rich”. It’s filled with examples of how to win people’s business.

Then, pick up the phone. In this automated digital world, there’s more spam and junk out there than ever before. If someone tells you cold calling is dead, it is not! It’s still an important part of the process.

Be amazing at it. I’ve worked sales in many industries. From Finance, Oil & Gas, Event Management, Supply Chain to Professional Development.

I know how to pick up the phone and close deals. Apps can’t do that…yet. If you can’t sell someone over the phone, you will eventually run into problems at some point.

Next, get a CRM software. You can put all that wonderful lead qualification and research you did into the system.

There are many cost effective, cloud based options available to you. Two of the best options are Insightly and SalesForce. Both companies have good free versions as well as tiered pricing and scalability as your needs increase.

You can keep track of your sales cycles, pipelines, leads and just about anything else you think is relevant to your business relationship.

You can save important dates to remember and integrate email so everyone at your company is aware of recent communication. Also, everyone else on your team will know a client’s status and information without having to bother you for it!

Not having a good CRM can cause havoc internally across divisions. It’s all about communication and can help settle disputes between staff, management, sales people and even customers.

There’s a trail to follow and a level of accountability. There’s nothing worse than having sales staff harass a prospect because there was an internal miscommunication.

I’ve lost a $100,000 deal because a salesperson at THE SAME company called one of my prospects I’d opened negotiations with and tried pitching him on a different product. A proper CRM system would have most likely prevented this.

Finally, follow up on a popular social media platform. For example, if you had a good meeting with a prospect, follow up with a Tweet or post on their Facebook page.

Post a review of their product or service. Share their content. Offer to guest blog. Be visible about your new relationship. Create some external engagement. Open your network to them. Start a conversation.

Grow together. There’s a lot you can do. Nowadays, most of the major social media sites are free, or relatively inexpensive.

Get a Facebook account, create a page. Learn to use Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn.

These can all be valuable tools for mining leads and building your brand and company image. Be consistent across them.

Find out interesting strategies that work for you. In a year and a half, I grew my personal twitter to over 38,000 followers.

Our company of 3 people has over 100,000 Twitter followers altogether. We use a management tool called ManageFlitter.

We pay around $25 USD for this plan but can attach 5 Twitter accounts to it. Good value for the reach.

It’s a powerful program if used correctly. If you have a big audience or following, your customers will undoubtedly benefit from the exposure and visibility. And, of course, log your social media engagement and activity into your CRM system.

It all adds up. Keep your brand, company image and customer service strong. Most of all, have fun. If you don’t love what you’re doing, you shouldn’t be doing it.

Have passion and it will shine through in everything that you do. Your customers will see that.

Be so good at what you do that they’d be crazy not to work with you.

Brian_Corrigan[1]Brian Corrigan

MagneticContent.biz // @Twitter

~ Content Director | Inbound Marketer | Former #Tech Journalist | Amateur Cook | Evertonian ~

My advice would be to find a niche and work to own it. It can be scary to keep dissecting your potential target audience but it’s much easier to be relevant when you have a clear understanding of the people you’re talking to.

Without relevance it’s impossible to be useful. If you’re not useful, you’re just adding to the meaningless noise we filter out every day.

Joe Pulizzi at the Content Marketing Institute calls this approach the Content Tilt – understanding what makes your business different and using it to create your unique selling point (USP).

Before starting a content marketing business I spent a long time working as a B2B technology journalist. When I made the switch I tried a broad approach to the market because I was scared of limiting our opportunities.

Looking back this was a dumb idea and now we only work for B2B technology companies. Our primary audience groups are the regional CMOs or marketing directors of large multinationals.

We also target the marketing managers of smaller, local businesses that take these products and services to market.

Our content tilt is based on my industry knowledge of how this complex network of companies operates. So now we’re targeting the channel managers who handle the sales and marketing relationships between these two types of business – vendors and their channel partners.

That’s our content tilt. Here’s a recent blog post and e-book we just published as an example of how targeted the content is. It’s very niche but highly useful to the right audience, which means the leads it generates are exactly the kind of people we can help with our services.

So spend some time identifying the group(s) of people your business can really help. Make sure not to confuse the people you can help with those you’d most like to help. Get this right and it will be the best B2B marketing move you ever made.

Clement_Lim[1]Clement Lim

LimWriter.com //@Twitter

~ B2B copywriter and content marketer. Helping B2B brands to grow their traffic and boost sales ~

In my opinion, content marketing remains a very effective strategy for B2B brands. Through content marketing, my clients have been able to raise brand awareness, increase engagement, and generate leads.

However so many businesses are churning out content these days it’s hard to be noticed. According to the Content Marketing Institute, only 30% of B2B marketers said they were effective at content marketing.

The 7 essential elements of an effective content marketing strategy are as follows:

1. Thoroughly research your audience.

Find out what their needs and pains are. Many businesses simply assume they know what their audience wants. Don’t make that mistake. You need to listen to their conversations online and in real life. Better still, ask them.

2. Define who you are.

Create a unique value proposition that sets you apart from the crowd. It could be the products you sell, it could be your ethos, it could even be your visual branding.

3. Define your goals.

Each audience member will be at different stages of the buyer’s journey. Some will just be looking for general information. Others may be thinking of buying and want specific answers. Some will be ready to place an order.

4. Produce outstanding content.

Your content must be relevant and useful to your audience. It must be better than what your competition has to offer.

5. Promote your content to the right places.

Identify where your audience likes to hang out and promote your content there. This can include social media posting, guest blogging, and LinkedIn publishing.

6. Track your results.

Find out what’s working and what isn’t. Tweak what you’re doing and see if you can do even better.

7. Scale your content.

Learn to repurpose, repackage and recycle your content. This will save you time and energy.

Find out more about my B2B marketing strategies here.

Sharon_Drew_Morgen[1]Sharon Drew Morgen

SharonDrewMorgen.com // @Twitter

~ Sales Visionary, Consensus Management, Speaker, Inventor, NYTimes Bestsellling Author. Developer of Buying Facilitation™ ~

People are bombarded with content that pushes solutions at them all day. We seem to think that if we push the right data, promoted in the right way, at the right time, we’ll increase business. But the numbers of buyers are going down.

We forget that a buying decision is a change management problem, not a solution choice issue.

A buying decision is a 12 step process in which buyers figure out how to assemble all the right stakeholders (not obvious), figure out if they want to fix something, or create a workaround (The very last thing they need is to buy anything. Buyers merely want to resolve a business problem.) the sort of change issues that must be managed, and how to get consensus.

Only when all is complete do they realize they may need to buy anything. So when we send solution data, and it’s received prior to the above steps, the marketing data will be ignored regardless of the need or the efficacy of the solution.

We end up closing only the low-hanging-fruit as a result – and are then already in a price competition as prospects search online for all available solutions.

A way to circumvent this is to write an article that will help your market make systemic change decisions and that they can use en route to a purchase. I had a new book coming out that was well outside my normal market.

Instead of promoting it conventionally, I wrote an article on how to have effective meetings – how to assemble all the proper people to ensure consensus.

There was no mention of the new book in the article – or even the topic! – but at the bottom I had a simple link to my new book (on how to hear each other with no bias).

The article went viral; I got emails from all over the world, thanking me and telling me they circulated the article to employees and colleagues. And I got a 54% conversion to my book.

Stop pushing solutions. Start facilitating the buying decision process which is beyond your solution details. Buyers can always find your solution details once they get the buy-in to make a purchase.

Yasmine_Blosse[1]Yasmine Blosse

AllAboutGoodMarketing.com // @Twitter

~ B2B marketing & communications strategist & blogger. I tweet about social media & #Marketing. Proud to have been named a top 50 UK #B2B #Marketing influencer. ~

Is there a single, fail proof B2B marketing strategy? One that works for any business, regardless of size, industry and growth targets?

Yes, there is. And surprisingly, it’s one that gets ignored time and time again in favour of the “strategy du jour”.

The name of this proven, fits-all, works-every-time strategy: a strategy that is relentlessly customer-focused single-mindedly market-oriented.

How does it work? This orientation ensures that you never lose sight of the right end goal: delivering customer value and creating an “outside-in” orientation.

Without a market-focused strategy, B2B marketers risk becoming ‘producters’.

A laser sharp focus on the value chain keeps B2B marketing teams on their toes: when new products launch, they don’t rush out a press release. They ask: So what? Why should the market care?”

And then they go off and formulate answers and use these to construct campaigns that clearly articulate the product’s value proposition and unique selling points.

Customer focus as a strategy: works every time, gets ignored most of the time…

Hang on, I hear you say. “If it’s as simple as that to come up with a winning B2B marketing strategy, wouldn’t everyone do it?”

And what about the importance of innovation and disruptive new products? Well, clearly product innovation is key to retaining existing customers, winning new ones and winning marketshare from your competitors.

Let’s look at what happens when product innovation is not aligned with a customer-focused marketing strategy. A photo printing company, which shall remain unnamed, held a one-week product innovation offsite.

Its product and sales teams were very concerned about losing ground to digital photo products.

Revenue and morale were down as the company’s customers were increasingly snapping pictures and sharing them on-the-go online.

After one- week of intensive discussions and a review of their existing product portfolio, the company found a solution: They would launch a product – a photo-printer that customers could clip onto their belts.

Now, if you have not seen many people walking around with printers strapped to their waists, that’s because the product bombed.

Launched without any market research or feedback from existing customers, the idea and the company’s share price sank faster than the Titanic.

It might be old-fashioned, but “the customer is always right” is a timeless truth and valid for B2B and B2C companies alike.

Becky_Park_DeStigter[1]Becky Park DeStigter

The-International-Entrepreneur.com // @Twitter

~ International Business Speaker, Author & Consultant to B2B Tech & Services Companies. World Traveler & Language Junkie! ~

In B2B all the best marketing channels focus on conversation

  • trade shows
  • social media
  • networking
  • etc.

Doug_Kessler[1]Doug Kessler

VelocityPartners.com // @Twitter

~ Creative Director & Co-founder of Velocity, B2B marketing agency to the stars. ~

Make the single best content on the web for your sweet spot issue. Repeat.

Read:

Two ways to fail in B2B content marketing

Aim high.  Fail big.  Go for the red zone.

Sean PlattSean Platt

SterlingAndStone.net // @Twitter

~ Publisher, entrepreneur, co-author of Write. Publish. Repeat. I write awesome books. People like them. ~

Tell the truth. People can smell BS.

Read

Alyson_Button_Stone[1]Alyson Button Stone

KiteDesk.com // @Twitter

~ Content Director at KiteDesk. I believe that salespeople are heroic. On a mission to help them succeed with the best sales experts’ advice! ~

I have an absolutely foolproof strategy that I’ve used throughout my marketing career. It works every time. It’s called “pushing the rock.”

Two jobs ago I discovered the fascinating truth of doing the drudgery in my marketing role, the grunt work, and repeating it every single day. The result?

Every indicator of success climbed up and to the right. There is no glory, no applause, no kudos for this method, so don’t expect any.

There’s no tipping point where the needle jumps — just a growing body of work that enables more wins.

It’s a messy, tiring slog — sometimes fun, other times…not fun.

There is one guiding force behind my dedication to this strategy — the certain knowledge (my own experience!) that my chores and Cinderella life will pay off in good results.

So it’s easy to have faith, in a way, once you KNOW that what you believe in will happen. Because you’ve seen it work over and over. You’ve seen the graphs climb up, and up, and up.

If there was one lesson I could give to younger marketers, it would be to have faith that pushing the rock really makes things happen. Here’s how it works:

  • Incomplete List of the Ongoing Tasks of a Marketing Team
  • Research to identify the Ideal Customer
  • Maintain blog
  • Tweak website content
  • Advertising strategy
  • Social promotion of our content and product(s) on popular channels
  • Publish regularly (frequently)
  • Recruit contributors
  • Daily: promote the content and resources most likely to appeal to readers
  • Daily: do outreach to sales communities
  • Daily: observe and analyze the content of competitors and thought leaders
  • Daily: Welcome each new subscriber to the blog
  • Daily; Promote our blog post(s)
  • Daily: Plan for future blog posts
  • Regularly promote other content important to our own contributors. Promote their brand, events, webinars.
  • Follow people on their social channels
  • Interact with people on their social channels
  • Comment on the blogs of others
  • Apply for meaningful annual awards to raise awareness of the blog and the company
  • ,,,
  • ,,,
  • ,,,
  • Lunch (Many days, I’m not kidding about this!)

Results: This month our site visitors total was the highest ever. Our MQLs are up hockey-stick style. Our Sales? Up.

Company: growing and hiring. Of course, it goes without saying that everyone on our team has a similar laundry list of tasks big and small that they do religiously throughout their day.

And, the results are pretty conclusive. It’s everyone, doing all the things, all the time. It’s not one thing — it’s ALL the things. Guaranteed success comes from pushing a rock. That’s a powerful lesson.

Now, the ball is in your court. We want you to let us know…

“What is your best B2B Marketing strategy that works virtually every time and WHY?”

Your comments, questions and suggestions are more than welcomed.

We also encourage you to share this blog post on your favourite social channel and earn some clout 🙂

Thanks for reading!

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