Five implications for B2B Content Marketing
The Content Marketing Institute recently published its latest 2014 B2B Content Marketing Report, which contains some interesting insights about the role content marketing plays in successful B2B marketing strategies.
The implications for content marketing in 2014
Viewing the report got us thinking about the way the content marketing realm has broadened for B2B marketers. Here are our top five take-aways from the report which B2B enterprises can use to leverage your content marketing strategies for the next year.
1. Content marketing is increasingly accepted in the marketing strategies of all B2B businesses
Now we need no special marketing report to believe that. The rate of acceptance however comes as a surprise. A wonderful surprise that is. The report found that 93% of all B2B marketers use content marketing in their marketing mix.
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Getting the website design style balance right
There’s often a preconception that designers and digital strategists do battle on a daily basis, but in our experience, this is simply not the case. Great websites require both sides to debate their points to reach the best conclusion – a healthy balance between design, functionality and persuasion. There are many different page types which make up a great website, each requiring a different strategic and design approach. In this blog post, we will look at a sample of pages from both perspectives with a view to finding that sweet spot where both are balanced and both combatants are happy.
The Homepage
Creative-led design example
This is where you grab the viewer’s attention. This may be your only chance to keep the new visitor on your site / side, so you need to be direct and achieve an…
Plus 4 examples of videos aligned with business goals
We find that many of our B2B clients have a lack of confidence about their businesses suitability to video (or should that be the other way around?).
They think that in order for a product to work in a video it needs to be entertaining in itself. But that is just not true - there are plenty of stories behind every business that are best communicated using video.
In many cases it is often easier with B2B as the target customer is often more clearly defined and understood. What is more complicated with B2B video is that marketers need to work harder to convince a number of decision makers in an organisation.
Here is an example of how we used 2 short videos to increase a B2B clients website by 10% - it only took 1 month to achieve this…
Which email clients should we design and test for? 2014 update
It's important to agree the target email clients you want the email to be displayed in when briefing an agency to develop a new email template or enewsletter layout. Of course, large volume senders will want the email to render in all, but for smaller businesses it's OK to target and test a smaller number.
Traditionally the main email clients to target were the main webmail services plus different Outlook versions.
Hotmail
Yahoo! Mail
Gmail
Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010
B2B marketers would have added different versions of Lotus Notes and Blackberry with Gmail becoming more important through time amongst professionals.
In 2014 this is radically different - you also need to think really seriously about how emails will render on different mobile platforms.
This 2014 infographic has the data published from their clients for the whole of 2013 - it's from the excellent Litmus…
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20 Jan 2014
How to effectively manage your data for marketing automation success
As a data-driven initiative, marketing automation is heavily dependent upon the accuracy, completeness and validity of the data that the technology will run on.
Inaccurate and out-of-date data, gaps in information and poorly integrated data will all serve to compromise the core objectives of marketing automation, hindering the ability to create relevant, timely and engaging communications, and ultimately undermining efforts to increase loyalty and sales.
Worse still, marketing processes driven by bad data can actually damage customer relationships, as demonstrated by numerous studies.
'According to one survey, 55% of respondents had been sent information about an irrelevant product by a business in the previous 12 months,' says Nigel Turner, VP of information management strategy at Trillium Software. 'A large minority (47%) said they are ‘annoyed’ when a business gets their personal information wrong, and 35% said such errors reduce their faith in…
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17 Jan 2014
How to choose the best marketing automation system for your business
Whether you’re an existing user of marketing automation or you’re preparing to invest for the first time, the rush of acquisitions in the sector can be disruptive to your technology decision-making.
For those yet to invest, it can cloud the solutions in uncertainty. While existing users of one vendor have the disruption of suddenly finding themselves customers of a different company entirely. And if you’re an Eloqua user that isn’t happy about becoming an Oracle customer, then it means you’re back into the market for a new solution.
But the recent spate of activity is entirely reshaping the marketing automation landscape.
'In some ways, the discrete category of marketing automation is fading away a bit,'says Gerry Brown, Senior Digital Marketing Analyst at Ovum. 'IBM, Oracle, Salesforce.com, Adobe and Teradata have all been involved in mopping up best-of-breed marketing automation companies of…
Resources and examples to inspire effective mobile experiences
Responsive Design (RWD) is a key trend in creating effective online customer experiences driven by the need to cost-effectively build sites across desktop, tablet, phablet and smartphone.
I featured it at #13 in the digital marketing techniques that would be important in my 2014 digital marketing trends post and Smart Insights readers voted investment in mobile as the second trend with the most commercial potential for 2014.
To help marketers to create effective experiences we have featured many articles discussing best practice, examples and implementation for responsive design on Smart Insights through 2012 and 2013 which I thought it might be helpful to collect together here:
An Introduction to Responsive Website Design for Marketers
Planning your RWD
Case Study on Oxfam in Ireland on RWD
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Research shows how just-in-time content can re-engage abandoning visitors
When it comes to bounce on B2B landing pages, the numbers are depressing. Marketers put a lot of time and energy into these crucial pages, and research says the large majority of businesses depend on landing pages as part of their lead-generation strategy. Yet the majority (more than 50%) of traffic will bounce, perhaps never to return. The waste and inefficiency can be HUGE if landing pages aren't optimised or other relevant content isn't available.
[Editor's note: This post reviews different ways to measure engagement and explains bounce rate and typical benchmarks if your not familiar with it. Bounce rates for blogs can be in the range 60-80%, so it's worthwhile designing the blog to encourage some of these visitors to engage more].
Much of the time spent developing effective landing pages focuses on content optimization and enticing calls-to-action (CTAs) to grab…
Best practices for online form data capture
Lead capture forms need to minimise data collection, but of course you do need profiling info to qualify the lead so you can follow-up with relevant content or contacts. So it's difficult to get the balance right between sign-ups vs data collection for lead generation. Often this balance isn't right as analytics shows campaign targets are not attained with bounce rates too high.
The Marketing Ninja from Singlehop has produced what we think is a useful infographic summarising the issues to boost form conversion which collates different advice on best practice for increasing form conversion including how to test your form, which buttons to use and more.
To make this post more useful, we asked The Marketing Ninja for details of resources for form best practices so you can follow-up on…
Google introduces 3 options to review content effectiveness in Google Analytics
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Google Analytics announcement
The lack of options for content grouping in Google Analytics has been surprising given that it has been a core feature of established analytics systems like Webtrends and Site Catalyst since as long as I can remember.
It’s true that you can use the Content Drilldown to review the effectiveness of different content types in driving visits leads and sales as we recommend in our guide to Google Analytics, but this only works if you have a site structured with a clear hierarchy of folders.
In the real-world, many sites particularly Ecommerce sites, or other sites pulling products from a database don’t have this. In these cases your best option was to create a custom filter for grouping content as Peter O’Neill outlines.
Google has introduced 3 options for setting up content grouping and reporting.…
