The marketing world is going quickly.
There is no assurance that what is going to work today will still work in a month—never less than a year. But how do you make sure you don't lose out on the next big trend in B2B marketing?
It's not always that convenient. The internet is filled with posts forecasting up-and-coming B2B marketing patterns, without offering any real advice about how to tap into these trends. That's why we've put together this list of a few B2B marketing examples to give you a dose of inspiration ahead of your next major campaign.
1. Use ABM to challenge the goliath's in your game
Everyone knows that ABM can help tap into bigger accounts. But it is also important to realize that turning those accounts into customers would require a much deeper level of insight, centered around appealing to a more strategic, higher-value audience.
Having run persona workshops to understand the roles, pain points, buying cycle relevance, and content preferences of each individual involved in the decision-making process, Couchbase used social persona data and keyword volumes to eliminate guesswork from its content strategy. This allowed the creation of laser-targeted content for each individual, as well as information on where and how to deliver it.
The result? Couchbase was swift to develop a $1.5 million revenue pipeline, secure in the fact that it could generate the content needed to transfer prospects down the sales funnel. That, too, with a goliath like Oracle as a competitor in the category they operated in.
2. Live chat as a breath of fresh air
Imagine if we told you that you could never use another lead capture form in your life. You would just call us mad! How will you ever generate leads for your business?
Drift has categorically shown that you can catch a lead without using a form. In reality, it was the founder of the #NoForms movement, aimed at showcasing alternate approaches to the lead gen.
Importantly, Drift was willing to observe what he had preached. The business deleted its website forms and invested on live chat – and the returns were amazing, to say the least. 63% of people who open a chat box on Drift's pricing page chose to launch a discussion with a sales representative. By contrast, its standard email campaigns – fueled by addresses obtained from lead capture forms – produced click rates of 2-3 per cent.
3. Referral programs are not only for B2C
There is a widespread misunderstanding that referral marketing only operates with consumer promotions. Carpathia – which sold large-scale enterprise cloud solutions, has proven that referral marketing is a fantastic way to reach B2B audiences too.
Although the products of Carpathia were relatively complex, its referral programme could not have been simpler. It took only three short steps to become a Carpathia Referral Partner. Having registered, the partners were granted access to case studies, white papers and other sales tools and paid a commission on the referral of new customers.
Social testimonials is one of the most powerful things influencing consumer decisions, and Carpathia understood this very well to highlight the strength of it's offering.
A quote and a name go a long way in helping people feel more reassured when they’re making important business decisions.
4. Long form content works
Stop writing 700-word, keyword-targeted blog posts and spend time creating something brilliant. Something that really is pushing the envelope. Something better than everything else out there. Mailshake spent six months building their "Cold Email Outreach Playbook", after an intense process involving:
Identifying the subject area
Completely studying the subject matter
Dig important keywords
Construction of a detailed description
Contact the appropriate influencers to seek their feedback
Reading and making up a playbook
Launching and encouraging this
In the year since their guide was released, it has taken more than 50,000 visitors to the Mailshake website and allowed them to register more than 590 customers. With a product price beginning at $29 per month, you can easily find out what kind of effect the playbook has made on their bottom line.
5. Dropbox achieves a ROI of 25:1 with thought leadership
The file hosting service was seeking to get in front of a new demographic – marketers & advertisers. It has developed a stable, collaborative microsite with an appraisal tool that helps users to figure out what kind of marketer they are. The findings were extremely customised and highly shareable, leading to the participation of entire agencies and marketing teams.
The measurement applet was just the tip of the iceberg. The B2B digital marketing strategy also featured psychometric analysis, infographics, blog entries, and a 20-page ebook – another example of a company spending time in content to build something that blows away competitors. In a spectacular way the campaign hit and delivered 220 per cent of its lead generation goal and delivered an initial ROI of 25:1.
In another thought leadership example - Adobe took advantage of one of its newly acquired assets – specifically, the Omniture-owned website CMO.com – to reposition the Adobe brand. Today, it is regarded as one of the best content marketing hubs on the internet, receiving more than 100,000 visitors every month. With large resources of original and curated materials that are particularly important to marketing administrators, Adobe has remained a top-of-the-line organisation in the hunt for marketing solutions.
6. Philips cut costs through influencer marketing. What?
Think of "influencer" and you inevitably imagine travel Instagrammer taking images of sunrise yoga sessions and infinity pools. Yet influencer marketing still has a big part to play in the B2B marketing mix – you just need to identify the right influencers.
When Philips, one of the largest electronics firms in the world, wanted to switch to a truly digital marketing platform, he put influencers at the forefront. The first part of the process saw the development of a digital control centre serving its ASEAN market, dedicated to tracking and engaging in social commentaries on the company, its goods and categories relevant to its sector. Philips established a set of keywords that allowed it to track down the most relevant accounts within three groups of social users:
Media
Influencers
Advocates
This gave the company an active list of social users to reach out to for engagement and content sharing opportunities. Damien Cummings, CMO of Philips ASEAN, said he expected the command center to have a “net neutral” impact on the company’s marketing spend, while reducing costs in the long term.
7. Use automation to nuture leads of your campaign
The email nurturing campaign implemented by Automizy around its "Marketing Automation Challenges Report" is a good example of how this process works in practice. The campaign nurtured leads through four steps:
Leads chose to download the report from the dedicated campaign landing page.
This action prompted an automatic email, which thanked the user for opting in and providing a connection to the article, followed by a short sales pitch for Automizy's tools.
Two days later, a second email was sent to the customer containing access to helpful educational tools.
By this point, Automizy believes it has built a friendly rapport with the prospect, meaning it won’t feel inappropriate to send a more detailed sales pitch with a “Free Trial” CTA.
A simple, lucid workflow and good platform like hubspot and get you a long way to results like these.
Have you seen any fantastic, must-share examples of inspiring marketing campaigns? Let us know in the comments below. #saas #saasmarketing #growthmarketing