- Timely Marketing Tips from The Marketing Pros
- Michelle (Dattellas) Chiantera, Chief Marketing Officer at Corel
- Michael Nagle, GM of Streaming/Senior Director of OTT Distribution & Partnerships at Gannett | USA TODAY NETWORK
- Jacqueline Frasca, Director of Digital Experience Marketing at PTC
- Alec Shirkey, Director of Marketing at LexShares
- Ollie Whitfield, Growth Marketing at VanillaSoft-AutoKlose
- Tim Hillison, Chief Marketing Officer at entrypoint1
- Our Weekly Marketing Tips
- Ardath Albee, CEO & B2B Marketing Strategist at Marketing Interactions
- Rohit Gupta, Senior Marketing Manager – Content Marketing at Replicon
- John Cass, Co-Founder AIContentGen & Freelance Content Designer
- Niki Hall, Chief Marketing Officer at Contentsquare
- Julianne Garry, Chief Marketing Officer at Info-Tech Research Group
- Chelsea (Yoder) Yoder, VP of Brand and Marketing at Resultant
- What would you add to these marketing tips?
Throughout the month of July, we reached out to people in marketing roles to ask them for their best B2B marketing tips right now.
And people responded with some great ideas.
Each person was kind enough to allow us to link back to their LinkedIn profile. If you want to follow up with them to learn more, do so, we know they would love to converse with anyone about these topics.
Timely Marketing Tips from The Marketing Pros
Michelle (Dattellas) Chiantera, Chief Marketing Officer at Corel
The buying experience has completely digitized which gives marketing incredible leverage.
Using data and insights to understand your buyer’s behaviors is a superpower.
Marketing can now be more relevant to their audience using simple tactics – how customers engage with content to social sentiment.
A data-driven marketing approach is now a given.
Michael Nagle, GM of Streaming/Senior Director of OTT Distribution & Partnerships at Gannett | USA TODAY NETWORK
If you’re sending out a cut & paste communication to save time, make the time to personalize an introduction or something to personalize it.
Personalization matters.
Relationships matter.
That’s what closes business.
People do business with people they like doing business with.
Jacqueline Frasca, Director of Digital Experience Marketing at PTC
Always be testing.
The smallest UX or content changes on your website can make big impacts, even on a page-by-page basis.
Hypothesize the impact on key KPIs, make the change, and document how it did—and if you saw big improvements, scale it and keep going.
You don’t need to invest in an A/B or user testing tool (though it helps you go bigger!) to consistently optimize your site. If you don’t have someone strategizing web improvements for your users on your biggest sales tool, I promise you are missing easy wins—the kind that don’t take a quarter to plan and the approval of 8+ people.”
AND TIP #2
The purpose of any website is to be found.
Whether you have an incredible in-house team or work with an agency, be sure everyone in your marketing org (and beyond) understands that your organic market visibility is critical.
Long gone are the days where the keyword ruled everything around us.
Ensure your teams are working on semantic and technical SEO as well as on-page optimizations focused on relevance with SERP analysis.
Building your topical authority and automating schema markup will set up your entire domain for success—and all it will cost is your time, focus, and purposeful, strategic content creation.
Alec Shirkey, Director of Marketing at LexShares
Turn buyer industry news and insights into a short newsletter.
Most B2B decision-makers are busy people who may not have time to comb through long articles, podcasts, and research reports. Why not do the heavy lifting for them?
- Set up a few Google Alerts, subscribe to key trade publications, and join any relevant LinkedIn, Slack, or Reddit communities.
- Then compile and briefly summarize the best content for them every one to four weeks, depending on the frequency or your industry’s news cycle.
- (Bonus points if your company happens to make its own news every so often.) It’s a low-effort way to deliver value, build credibility, and keep your brand top of mind — especially for small marketing teams that might produce their own content less frequently.
Ollie Whitfield, Growth Marketing at VanillaSoft-AutoKlose
The ability to find and strike a working relationship with partners in your space is now essential. If you can find folks who are trying to attract similar personas, you stand to gain more and more every time you work with them.
Webinar guests, promotion, podcast appearances, referrals, partnered content, it all works time and time again. You don’t have to find a new partner to work with on everything you do.
Give me the same 10 partners we work with all the time for our content and projects. Let me collaborate with them on their projects. We can all eat, nobody goes hungry.
If I scramble for new guests all the time, to try and achieve reach and to meet new audiences, it’s tough.
Tim Hillison, Chief Marketing Officer at entrypoint1
Align with your internal stakeholders early and often.
Getting everyone on the same page and agreeing on what success looks like at the beginning of an initiative, will allow for a smoother rollout, increased agility when optimizing (iterating) content, and create a metrics-driven mindset.
A thoughtful setup not only builds momentum, but also smooths team communications, change management, and executive read-outs.
Do not discount the importance of starting with the end in mind in the post-Covid world where remote work and unknown good intentions may lead to misinterpretation. World-class execution is a team sport.
Ardath Albee, CEO & B2B Marketing Strategist at Marketing Interactions
Do something every day to get to know your buyers and customers better.
Buyer intelligence is critical for engagement, your credibility, their confidence, and advancement toward buying your products. Self-reliant buyers are looking for information on their own. Most of them say there’s plenty of content, but it’s just not relevant to them. Nor is it helpful in exposing them to new ideas or making inroads to solving their problems.
I recently presented a webinar about putting B2B buyers back into your marketing strategy. When I asked the audience if they have enough insights to ensure their content and programs are relevant, not one of them entered “yes” into the chat. Not one.
Here are some ideas for how to gather buyer intelligence (unless you’re able to take on a persona development project):
1. Talk to your customers whenever you can. You’d be surprised what you can learn in a 30-minute call. Even if it’s only a few calls based on a topic to inform a content asset, it’s worth it. Over time you’ll build up a “playbook” for messaging and personas if you ask the right questions.
2. If your sales team and/or customer service team records calls, listen to some of them every week.
3. Identify which customers who fit your personas publish content, are interviewed, or speak on webinars – engage with their ideas.
4. If not your customers, are similar roles speaking out on LinkedIn, Reddit, or Quora? Follow them.
5. Remember that data only tells you what someone did, not why they did it or what they took away from that experience. You need qualitative insights to make data actionable.
6. Buyers and customers continue to change and evolve—so never stop being curious about them.
Rohit Gupta, Senior Marketing Manager – Content Marketing at Replicon
Listen carefully to the pain points of your customers/prospects with an open mind. Don’t be in a hurry to pitch your product or service.
Try and see if you can address the pain point.
The sale will happen automatically.
John Cass, Co-Founder AIContentGen & Freelance Content Designer
AI content generation tools provide writers and marketers with the tools to both generate content.
Though if you are generating the content, it’s best to generate content in sections.
Plus, the tools really help writers where possible when they have research and briefing features. Within a few minutes, a writer can have hours’ worth of research on topics, keywords, links, headlines, etc.
And then the tools can be used to generate a brief, either automatically, or by a writer taking the research and building a brief.
Check out these infographics to learn more.
Niki Hall, Chief Marketing Officer at Contentsquare
When data strategies aren’t built around trust, a lot is on the line.
A new Harris poll reported three-quarters of 3,000 people surveyed are uncomfortable buying from brands with poor data ethics, and 89% said they’d be more likely to spend money with a brand that makes a commitment to protecting their personal data online over one that doesn’t.
If you think about that in terms of conversion or revenue, a trusted experience is as much a selling point as a product review or price.
Consumers care about their privacy — as they should — and brands need to recognize that and make data strategy decisions that give customers the confidence to interact with them online.
What they can do, first and foremost, is revisit their data strategies and determine which data points are critical to improving the business and omit everything that’s not.
Truly, you don’t need to ask someone their birthday or gender or phone number in order to serve them.
People don’t walk into a physical store giving that information so why would they want to online?
Brands simply shouldn’t ask for it. But, if for some reason a marketer does feel they need that information, they need to do three things:
1) give customers a way to opt out,
2) be transparent about the use of such data,
3) don’t abuse it.
Julianne Garry, Chief Marketing Officer at Info-Tech Research Group
Emotion is a powerful force Tap into the psyche of your buyer by understanding more than just their challenges; understand their frustrations, their aspirations, the little things that make their world unique.
Tapping in to those emotions creates an immediate connection that is very motivating.
Chelsea (Yoder) Yoder, VP of Brand and Marketing at Resultant
Keep your target account list small and personalize everything.
What would you add to these marketing tips?
John Moore is the Founder of Trust Enablement, the leader in independent go-to-market information. John invests his time into a mix of thought leadership and hands-on, practical insights that he delivers both through this platform and individual and group coaching and consultation.