Business-ready B2B Marketing Advice

We all remember when we were in maths class learning algebra and wondering when it would ever be applicable to real life. Let’s face it; whether you grew up to be a mathematician, it hasn’t benefited your life whatsoever. Why is it that much of what we learned at school doesn’t apply today, when there are so many other practical life lessons that didn’t make an appearance in the syllabus? I know I would have benefited from learning how to do my tax, or how to prepare for a job interview, for instance.

How is your marketing performing? Not many marketers are actually able to answer this truthfully, not because they don’t want to, but because they lack the right data, facts and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to measure against. KPIs are vital to any business in order to analyse what is and what isn’t working. But how do you find out what your KPIs should be? In a recent article on the HubSpot blog, Jesse Mawhinney discusses How to Choose the Right KPIs for Your Business.

We all want to be googleable, our business to rank high up that search engine page and to ultimately become a brand that people recognise, remember and return to. One way that companies are doing this now is through the wonder that is content marketing.

You’re ready to embark on your Inbound Marketing journey. You’ve identified the right team members to support your new strategy and they are thrilled to get going. The only issue: you don’t know where to start and how long it’ll take you. Thankfully, HubSpot’s Spencer Powell has a few handy tips for you, which he outlines in his blog post titled How to Build an Inbound Marketing Strategy in 24 Hours.

Thanks to marketing automation software, B2B marketers no longer have to devote huge chunks of time to doing mind-numblingly dull manual tasks such as uploading a single tweet at precisely 7:35am (because that is the best time), or remembering to send a thank you email to people who have downloaded content off your website (because, whoops, you've left that poor lead high and dry for about three weeks).Thankfully, marketing automation software helps to eliminate human error and gives us more time to be more productive in tasks that require creativity and brain power. Cheers to those helpful little robots!

Blogging regularly is one of the hardest aspects of Inbound Marketing. It takes a lot of planning and organisation, but even then it can drop down in the list of priorities. Unfortunately, you really can't afford to let this happen. The data doesn't lie - if you let your blogging lapse, so too will your visits, leads and even sales. 

The shift to inbound has happened, but is has also left a gap in the industry as marketing managers struggle to keep up with the transition to digital.

Relationships between brands and their prospects isn't much different from real life dating. People want to do business with people, so the way businesses build trust with them should be the same process as any other relationship. 

B2B marketers are always fighting against the clock, and squeeze out every last minute they have to optimise, improve and develop their marketing. This can often mean that those 'wish I could' jobs, like kick-starting your social media strategy, get pushed further and further towards the bottom of their endless to-do list.  This means that making effective and efficient management plans to execute your social media strategy is uberly important.

It is surprising how many marketers are either blissfully unaware or choose to ignore how their performance can affect their organisation's revenue, profits and margins. Decisions are often made based on instincts and hunches and this greatly irritates the sales teams who in turn struggle to meet monthly targets. CEOs and CFOs allocate the marketing budget as a cost centre and roll their eyes at the idea of a marketer taking a seat at the boardroom table. But, all this is about to change.