iPads and tablets in general started out as consumer devices for consuming media, but they’ve since made their way into the professional world – and they’re staying. Here are five ways a good choice of iPad can boost your business presence and power your marketing.
Streamlined marketing in the field
For your agents out and about, an iPad is a great way to have all the relevant information at hand. They can store and access customer history, stock levels, the latest catalogs etc. Cloud services and online search remove the need to contact the head office with any questions that might pop up.
Not only does using a handy iPad save valuable time, but it also gives an air of professionality and proactivity. Whatever query the prospect may have, your field agent can answer right then and there! Moreover, you can choose a sales app tailored to B2B marketing efforts and take advantage of targeted filters.
Streamline your offer by showing your prospects only the “top X products in category”, “new”, “updated” etc. You can also filter your own daily tasks. Utilize your sales app or the iPad’s map to keep tabs on customers in the area, or who made no purchase in the last quarter, whose invoices are late, who is due for a check-in visit etc.
Efficiency at corporate events
Events are the perfect context for your iPad to show its power as a marketing tool. Bring it along to panels, trade shows, various networking events, and anywhere else you might be expected to speak.
You can pre-record demos and product videos and play them back with the right app. You can also showcase collections or even improvise walkthroughs right there on the spot. These apps usually have offline functionality as well, which is essential at large venues where the WiFi tends to hiccup.
Most importantly, the on-the-go accessibility of the iPad increases your chances of landing sales. You can rapidly make new customer accounts, put together relevant orders, and send them necessary confirmations. If you need to double-check some details to seal the deal, you can add those final touches when you get back to the office.
Convey a high-tech brand image
Businesses in every industry have to keep up with tech advancements if they want their products and services to maintain a competitive edge. This applies to the tech you use in your communications as well as your production process.
To portray your company as modern, forward-thinking, flexible, and responsive, consider providing your staff with tablets instead of (or in addition to) laptops.
Admittedly, it’s a bit of an overhead investment, but you can choose the tablets that would bring you the optimal ROI. You can research, for example, the new Apple iPad Air price or any other model that suits your needs and see what would be the best investment for your marketing department.
Switching to the dynamic tablet from the comfort zone of presentations can be a little daunting, However, you have to consider the situation from the perspective of your prospects. They’re busy with their own work. Which format of a B2B pitch do you think they would be more willing to listen to?
Facilitate conversations with prospects
The device you use to provide information to your potential clients or partners can make a big difference in how your message is received. Traditional pitches from a laptop, computer, or projector come across as school presentations. They’re outdated and boring at best, alienating and condescending at worst.
Your marketing efforts will have a much higher chance of success if you format them as conversations instead. Load a tablet with interesting media and engage your prospects directly. It feels much more like a natural conversation when both the seller and the viewer are sharing the device.
Presentations are off putting because they’re one-directional and preachy. Using an iPad discourages boring slides and encourages interaction. You can pitch your business using videos, graphics, live demos, and so on. When the prospect sees the same information as the seller, at the same time, it communicates transparency and increases trust.
Real time analytics
Finally, accurate insight is one of the most important aspects of any business. Whether you’re tracking sales, leads, engagement rates, or anything else, it is essential for your representatives to be up to date by the minute.
A good iPad can provide detailed information on various forms of marketing materials too. For example, you can see which segments of your videos were paused and rewatched the most, or which pages in a PDF guide were the most interesting to prospects or new customers.
Detailed analytics like these are important for building context. They tell you how your sales agents are using different content, so your marketing team can optimize the conversion process. They enable you to craft the right pitch for each lead, reach out to them at just the right moment, navigate the sales conversation more strategically, and close a deal more efficiently.
To sum up, a well-chosen iPad can be a powerful tool in your B2B marketing strategy. Tablets are more convenient than laptops and better for agents in the field. They improve your brand image and help foster conversations and connections with your prospects. As a bonus, you get real-time analytics insight and can optimize your process with far higher efficiency.
Do you have a clear and well-documented B2B content strategy? Do you invest in B2B content marketing initiatives?
For most of you, the answer to the first question would be no, but for the second a unanimous yes.
B2B marketers invest so much time and money into content marketing and still don’t bother to create a well-documented content strategy. According to a recent study, only 41% of B2B marketers have a well-documented content strategy.
If you are one of those marketers who don’t have a clear B2B content strategy, this post is for you. In this post, we will discuss five easy steps in which you can create a winning B2B content strategy that helps you drive more conversions and meet your marketing goals.
Ready to find out what these five steps are?
Here you go.
1. Define Your Goals
The process of creating a good B2B content strategy should always start with your end goals in mind. What is it that you want to achieve from your B2B content marketing initiatives?
Set clear and specific goals that can be completed realistically within your chosen time frame. Also, identify the key metrics that you will use to measure your performance on these goals. It is important to have an idea about how to measure your performance right from the beginning.
Once you clearly understand your goals, the rest of your strategy should be developed keeping these in mind.
2. Understand Your Target Audience
The next step in this process is to understand your target audience and their preferences. Have a clear understanding of who do you want to read your content and what you want your content to achieve.
Is your goal to reach the decision-makers in customer organizations and drive more sales? Do you simply want to create more brand awareness by reaching as many industry professionals as possible? Who is your target audience?
Understanding your target audience helps you better understand what type of content to create and which topics to cover. This helps you avoid unnecessary expenses on marketing that can occur when using the trial and error method, which is quite wasteful.
Instead, have a clear idea about who you are creating content for and then create targeted and relevant content for them. This will help you take your campaigns to the next level.
3. Identify Content Trends
Before you decide which content types and formats to use for your current strategy, you should do a content audit to see what worked well for you in the past.
You can do this by analyzing the performance of the content on your website and social media platforms. Most social media platforms have built-in analytics capabilities that you can use to understand which content has worked best for your audience.
You can use analytics tools for websites to understand how your web content has performed in the past and what your audience likes.
Based on those insights, you can choose the content formats that you will focus on for your current B2B content strategy. For example, if you see that, in the past, your audience has shown the highest engagement on video content, then create more video content in the future.
You can also leverage social listening tools to keep updated with the latest content trends in your industry.
By the end of this step, you should be clear about which content formats you will focus on more or less for your current content strategy. You can use content marketing tools to better manage your content strategies and get more engagement.
4. Conduct Thorough Keyword Research
If you want to create good content for your customers and prospects, then you should first understand what they search for most. This is where keyword research can help you.
Look at the most searched for keywords in your niche and make a list of the ones that are most relevant to your business. Then, sort those keywords by key metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, etc.
Once you have a list of keywords that you want to target through your content, start researching topics related to those keywords. Usually, you can find multiple topics around a single keyword.
You can also create topic clusters where a broader theme is covered by multiple content pieces on smaller sub-topics. This strategy is also good for SEO and helps establish you as an authority on the subject.
By the end of this process, you should have a list of topics about which you want to create content.
5. Document Your Content Strategy
Now, coming to the most important step of the process—strategy creations and documentation.
Please note that I am emphasizing documentation because it is very important to write down your strategy and make sure everyone on your team understands it. Documentation helps get everyone on the same page and ensures that each team member understands the broader strategy.
But, what should you cover in your B2B content strategy document?
Well, there are a lot of things that should be included, but here’s a basic list to get you started.
- List of keywords and topics that you want to cover
- Target audience segments and personas
- Your B2B content marketing goals
- Various content distribution platforms and posting frequencies for each
- Any other relevant information
Apart from this, you should also create a content calendar with exact publishing dates and times for each piece of content. Ideally, your content calendar should have at least a week’s worth of content planned in advance so that you can easily meet your posting schedule.
Overall, the idea is to make sure that your B2B content strategy is well-documented and easily accessible by your team members. This ensures a smooth process flow and avoids any confusion that may lead to mistakes.
Ready to Drive More Conversions with Your Content?
Having a clear B2B content strategy can help you achieve your marketing goals and get more conversions.
After all, you can only get the desired results when you are clear about what you want to achieve and how you plan to achieve it. That is exactly what a good B2B content strategy can do for your business.
So, what are you waiting for?
Use this post as your guide to create a winning B2B content strategy for your business and drive more conversions. Get started on it right now.
Author:
Shane Barker is a digital marketing consultant who specializes in influencer marketing, content marketing, and SEO. He is the co-founder of Attrock, a digital marketing agency. He has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, influencers with digital products, and a number of A-List celebrities.
Believe it or not emotion plays a very important role when it comes to how website visitors interact with your B2B brand. Getting someone to smile, laugh or even cry can be very rewarding when it comes to business growth.
Our friends over at B2B Marketing put together this infographic showing just how emotion can help when it comes to B2B marketing.
Pinterest once started out mostly as an app that acted as a novelty. Sharing photos of desks made from reclaimed wood and the best chicken pot pie recipes you will find online were the norm (still kinda are). However, Pinterest has evolved over the years into some thing much different. An evolution that spawned an industry of B2B marketers to take a second look at the social platform in order to spread the good word on their own businesses.
We asked 7 industry marketing experts to weigh in and discuss their thoughts on B2B marketing on Pinterest.
This is what they had to say.
Zach Murphy, Content Marketing Specialist, PB&J
As with any B2B initiative, clarity is king. The faster and more simple the point can be communicated, the better off you’ll be. In a world convoluted by buzzwords and complex product descriptions, images can often accomplish a fair amount in a much quicker format. Many businesses fall into the trap of listing product descriptions and attributes, to which prospects are left to deduce the eventual value on their own. By providing a visual of the solution itself, people can quickly see what a company has to offer. It’s very important that these images also connect people to relevant further information. For instance, when featuring a series of products, don’t simply link each photo to the homepage of your company. This product has captured somebody’s attention so take them to the product page on a website so that they could potentially purchase immediately or find more information about the product. The faster you can communicate and connect people to items they need, the better.
Brittney Borowicz, Marketing Manager, Grid Connect
Not all brands are meant for Pinterest. Just as with other social media channels, your audience may just not respond well. Brands and companies should not be on ALL social media platforms. If Pinterest may be a good platform for your brand, take the time to do it right and measure your success.
Melissa Megginson, Marketing Manager, Tailwind
*Don’t only pin your own content*. This is huge. DO NOT ONLY PIN YOUR OWN CONTENT. Pinterest users do not want blatant advertisements all over their Pinterest feed. So, rather than only pinning your content, pin articles related to your sector, interesting images, funny memes and mix in your products and articles.”
*Repin, repin, repin!* You know how great it feels to be repinned, so make sure to pass the feeling forward! You get to pass on the warm fuzzies and, also, guarantee that the content you send out to your followers is not overly self promotional.
Parisnicole Payton, Public Relations, The PNP Agency
A Pinterest marketing tip for anyone interested in growing their online presence, you must have a high social influence. In business, communal influence is essential, and it’s a prevalent business function to all entrepreneurs seeking national exposure, recognition. It’s imperative to utilize all social mediums to advertise, and market your business and industry expertise. The social media marketing strategy needs to be broad and quantify a social influence on Pinterest. To have a successful following on Pinterest, the marketing tip is to remain consistent in the conscious message of the brand. The marketing idea has to be creative, and demonstrate a social presence by building an influential impression. You can implement short video clips, insert your blog, and add news clippings. In essence, submit daily Pinterest postings, which provide relevant content in distributing and sharing information about the brand. The marketing needs to be unique in being informative, engaging and increasing brand awareness, which will result in local and national recognition.
Inga Van Riper, BuildtheStore
Mix things up: Followers will get bored with you very quickly if you post the same stuff. As I stated before, we only thought of Pinterest as being a showcase for products and manufacturers. It quickly evolved to so much more. It is exciting to visit a customer and see that they are using one of the display ideas that we created in one of boards.
Katie Mayberry, Principal Owner, Spyglass Digital
Pinterest is a great tool for B2B’s if they have the capacity for it. The key is thinking beyond your brand specifically and consider what is related to your brand but of broader interest to your market. GE is a great example of this. Their Pinterest description is #Pinning things that inspire us to build, power, move and cure the world. Their boards range from the informative, inspiring and humorous. These pins will show up in followers news feeds and make people think of GE.
Finally, you can optimize your Pinterest pins so that they show up in search results not only within Pinterest but also broader search engines. This furthers your brand reach and adds additional benefit to your social media activity.
Tena Pettis, tena.cious
Be Visual. You can’t have a Pinterest board without turning your ideas into graphics. Your custom content is necessary to gain momentum on this social media platform. Just sharing other content won’t put $ in your bank account.
B2B marketing and social media go hand in hand. If you are still trying to identify how you can find leads and visibility in the B2B space social media marketing efforts should be at the very top of your to do list. B2B internet marketing comes in a variety of different flavors and it is important for all businesses to engage in some sort of social media marketing on the internet.
The days of ignoring it because you don’t understand it are no longer a viable option. These days businesses that choose to ignore social media elements lose business to other engaging organizations. Do you really want to lose business?
Here are some ways to get involved with B2B social media marketing for your own business:
Launch a blog
Your B2B business should hands down have a robust blog that is written in daily. Rich media should be incorporated into your blog writing strategy like introducing industry videos, images and any other media that can hold a reader on the page a bit longer.
Leverage that blog
Great! You have been writing in your blog, now what? You have to be willing to push those posts around so you can maximize their visibility as much as possible. Don’t assume just simply writing a post and walking away from it is going to be all you need to do.
Here are some great locations to spread your blog wings:
- Facebook fan page
- LinkedIn Wall & LinkedIn groups
- Pinterest (must have rich media in post)
- Stumbleupon
- Digg
- Delicious
Some industries might have niche locations where you can submit news and info so you might have to just take a look and see what is available.
Show personality in your efforts
There are many different B2B businesses out there, how are you going to differentiate yourself from all of them? There is nothing worse that reading company blogs that feel like they written by an old boot. Your blog is your company voice and if that voice is unique in nature your social community will share that information.
Build a community
Of course this sounds easier said than done and it can take quite a bit of time to build a strong following but you have to start at some point.
Here are some ways to build fans:
- Retweet influential Twitter accounts
- Drop a Facebook Fan Box in your blog sidewall
- Follow other like minded Twitter accounts
- Share everything you do in the social space
If you stick to it and you continue to be consistent eventually people will take notice and when I mean people I mean your targeted audience.
Create great content
Content makes the social world go round. A well written blog post your community can use to make their day easier can deliver traffic for years. The goal is to create many of these great posts and eventually you have a nice steady stream of inbound traffic roaring into the station.