B2B MARKETING TIPS YOU CAN TRY RIGHT NOWThe Best Ideas, Straight from the Experts

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B2B marketing has become an interesting paradox.

While it’s widely recognized that today’s B2B buyer controls more of the buying process than ever, B2B marketers are still expected to take on greater ownership of the customer lifecycle from start to finish. But how? How can B2B marketers not only connect with their increasingly distant buyers, but stay engaged with them throughout the full customer lifecycle?

The secret to success is simple: position your company as a helpful resource and industry leader throughout the sales process, and ensure that your buyers have everything they need to be successful at every stage of their research — and beyond.

Think about the traditional ways that marketers connect with their buyers. In an ideal world, marketers are producing readily-available, high-quality content that organically brings visitors to their websites during the research process. Visitors then convert into qualified prospects and are added to targeted email marketing campaigns to help move them through the sales process. For visitors that don’t come in organically, marketers often turn to paid advertising to stay top of mind with potential

new customers. And throughout this process, marketers are constantly reporting on what’s working and what’s not — and learning what they can do better the next time around.

When it’s written out in just a few sentences, it sounds so simple! But the reality is that most B2B marketers are experiencing kinks in one or more of the areas mentioned above, whether it’s coming up with enough content to fuel the marketing engine, reaching their target audience, or reporting on success.

That’s why we’ve gathered together B2B marketing tips from some of the greatest minds in the industry and pulled them together in this e-book. Flip through the following pages for sixty quotes-worth of marketing inspiration, and learn how to:

• leverage your network to create truly influential content

• build personalized emails that move prospects through the sales cycle

• optimize organic and paid promotion channels for the biggest results

• use data to make more informed decisions

Introduction

According to a 2016 report by the Content Marketing Institute, 88% of B2B companies are currently using content marketing, but only 30% feel that their efforts are successful.

For many organizations, it comes down to a lack of strategy and communication between teams; for others, experience and resources. Whatever the case may be, almost all B2B marketing organizations have room to grow their content marketing efforts. In fact, the same study found that 67% of marketers classify their content maturity level as either ‘adolescent,’ ‘young,’ or ‘first steps.’

If you feel that your content marketing is ready to take the leap from ‘adolescent’ to ‘mature’ (or even downright ‘sophisticated’), take a look at the tips in the following chapter, and start thinking about how you can level-up your content efforts. You can also download our Content Creation Guide for more tip sheets and worksheets to help refine your content strategy.

Crank up Your Content Marketing

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“Your sales representatives are the ones actually listening to your customers for hours each day. Though it’s easy for marketing to write the content or videos they want prospects to read, in reality, it’s best to create the content your prospects want to read. Simply asking your sales team what questions they are constantly answering gives marketing departments the opportunity to create highly targeted content that is guaranteed to help customers in their buying journey.” - Jenna Puckett, Editor TechnologyAdvice

“If you try to write for everybody, you write for nobody.” - Matthew Stibbe, CEO Articulate and Turbine

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“Brainstorm the topics your readers really care about that your competition is ignoring. Think beyond headlines and keywords and really dive deep into your readers’ problems and biggest fears.” - Nathan Ellering, Content Marketing Lead, CoSchedule

“It may sound like a given, but you’d be surprised how often buyer personas are missing when it comes to content. Developing your buyer personas (or ideal customer profiles), and documenting the typical buyer’s journey will help you develop a content map that corresponds to the journey and the personas. Basically, you document your target audience and the questions and concerns they have when purchasing your product or service.” - Adam Waid, Sr. Manager of Client Advocates, Pardot

Think about your audience(s).

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“The businesses that we see that are having some level of success are those that are taking the time to do strategic planning for (1) why content should exist in the first place and (2) how it will be managed, optimized, and measured in order to move the needle for the business. Those that are actually creating a written strategic document for the management of their content are those that are succeeding with it. Maybe that sounds like a “duh.” It’s such a simple thing, but so important. It makes it a real function of the business.” - Robert Rose, Chief Strategy Officer Content Marketing Institute

“The most important factor in succeeding as a content marketer is to acknowledge that your content is a business asset and worth managing efficiently and effectively.” - Scott Abel The Content Wrangler

Put a strategy in place.

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“At Salesforce, we recently tested a new content format: podcasting. It’s working extremely well with our B2B audience — I think because it de-stodgifies business topics by presenting real people, stories, and personalities. Building a podcasting audience takes time, so release at least 10-15 episodes before you decide if this is a content marketing channel for you.” - Heike Young, Co-Host Marketing Cloudcast

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“When marketers say they want to ‘improve’ their marketing content, many of them mean they want to create more. Instead, let’s shift the focus toward quality, which means getting the most out of fewer, higher-quality pieces of content. For example, break larger pieces of content into smaller, easily-distributed pieces of content. An e-book launch will be that much stronger when supported with blog posts, graphics, social posts, and more.” - Jenna Hanington, Senior Content Strategist Pardot

“A few visuals bring attention to your content, but too many visuals make it hard to digest. Even worse, if you go overboard on images, people might have trouble loading the page and close the tab before they ever read what you have to say. Remember: Your visuals should simultaneously grab your readers’ attention and further the story you want to tell.” - Brody Dorland, Co-Founder DivvyHQ

“The battle for content marketing success is won at the margins. Those extra few hours you spend to make your posts truly great, versus simply good. That’s what makes them interesting, unique and useful, and it’s what will appeal most to the people you’re trying to reach.” - Alex Turnbull, CEO & Founder Groove

Get the most out of every piece of content.

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“I do think hiring someone with design skills (or working with an agency) can make a big difference in your brand early on. It’s been proven that great images can really up your engagement on social and in emails. There are also some neat tools out there to help you fake it, like Canva, which I use for my personal design needs.” - Laura Horton, Sr. Manager of Communications Pardot

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“Recognize your community by featuring influencers, internal team members, customers, members of the media, your community, or prospective customers in your blog content. Make lists, co-create, do interviews, liveblog and get quotes for blog posts to shine a light on talent. Becoming influential is great. Helping others become influential is how you gain true influence. Show an interest in your community, engage and recognize. Do that, and you will never run out of relevant topics to blog about.” - Lee Odden, CEO TopRank Online Marketing

Tap into your network.

12 13“I like the “3 to 1” rule: Brands can share one piece of content or social message talking about their brand for every three pieces of content they share published by someone other than their brand.” - Kristen Matthews Marketing and Community Manager GroupHigh

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And finally, just be you.

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“Businesses often spend a lot of time on their logo and color palette and other things they think of as “branding” — the look and feel of their website, collateral, signage, fonts, and so on. But very few take the time to consider the branding that a unique voice can give your company. A key question is this: If you mask the logo on your site, do you sound different, unique — like yourself? Or do you sound like everyone else… including your competitors?” - Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer MarketingProfs

“It turns out that one of the best ways to gain and keep trust is be unusually open and honest. It shocks customers into wanting to do business with your company. Why? Because you vastly exceed their expectations of how a company is supposed to communicate.” - Jay Baer Convince & Convert

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With a foundation of content in place, the number of marketing programs at your fingertips can often appear quite limitless — especially when it comes to email marketing. According to a recent study by DMA, email marketing has an average ROI of 3800%, so it’s no wonder B2B marketers are itching to take their email game to the next level. However, as the experts in this chapter will tell you, successful email marketing is all about being intentional, relevant, and above all, courteous.

Read through the quotes on the following pages to learn more about email marketing best practices, including tips and tricks for launching those first nurture campaigns and personalizing your emails to each and every buyer. And remember: email may be a tool for mass communication, but just like with any other facet of B2B marketing, it’s all about catering to your individual buyers.

Read more about email marketing and deliverability best practices in our Complete Guide to B2B Email Marketing.

Amp up Your Email Marketing

18“Personalization is about so much more than a [first_name]. It’s about understanding what drives a person’s decision making process, where they are in that process, and placing all of it within the context of their specific challenges.” - John Bonini, Growth Director Litmus

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“One of the most powerful aspects of lead nurturing is that you can control the sender of the program. Create an automated nurture program that sends directly from your sales reps to their customers. This way, your marketing programs can be working in the background building relationships, while reps are actively reaching out to their customers.” - Maureen Flaherty, Email Marketing and Campaigns Specialist, Pardot

Never overlook the power of personalization.

“If you’re doing it right, each one of your recipients should read your email and think that you wrote it just for them. By having a firm grasp on your audience, and segmenting your database into tightly related groups, marketers can send hyper-targeted personalized email campaigns that specifically speak to each segment of their audience. Put simply, send people the emails that matter to them.” - Eric Krattenstein, US CMO Mailify

“The number one mistake most email marketers make is writing like a business. Unless you’re about to announce that you just released the iPhone 7, not writing like a real human to other real humans is killing your open and click-through rates. So, how can you write like a human? The easiest way is to actually picture yourself in a real conversation and simply write the way you’d talk. Then read it out loud. If anything smacks of non-conversationality (like the word “non-conversationality”) get rid of it. Keep it simple and keep it natural.” - Aaron Orendorff, Content Strategist iconiContent

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“When we talk about marketing automation, it’s important to put people first. It’s actually not about making thing more mechanical, it’s about making things more relevant, more personal. Facilitating better connections. I think at first the excitement was around just automating all the things, but now people are starting to master personalization.” - Laura Horton, Sr. Manager of Communications Pardot

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“While there are a number of different email tracks you can build, I think thought leadership content is great for bringing in new customers and making them aware of the problems they have and how your company can help. For people just learning about your product, try sending them easy-to-digest content like blog posts, infographics, or video clips. For customers who have more research under their belts and are ready to find a solution to a business problem, try sending them content that provides more information about how your product can solve key pain points and improve their return on their investment. At Pardot, our team created product feature guides, an ROI e-book, infographics, and even an interactive guided tour of our product to appeal more to customers who are in the final stages of the buying cycle.” - Maureen Flaherty, Email Marketing and Campaigns Specialist Pardot

Think about the stages of your sales cycle.

“As your buyers move through the funnel, you can start getting more specific with your content. Try sending out case studies that describe situations that are relevant to your prospects (for example, if they struggled with the same pain points, or are in the same industry). Content focused on ROI is also great for middle of funnel prospects — so consider sending out ROI calculators or white papers focused on reporting, sales, or conversion rates. At this stage, your goal is to get your buyers thinking about the advantages of using your product, as well as the disadvantages of not using it.” - Adam Blitzer, GM & SVP Pardot

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“Triggered emails have a reputation for being “set it and forget it” programs. We’ve even heard people laud that as one of principal reasons to use triggered emails — that once you set them up, they just quietly mint money and you never have to touch them again. Unfortunately, that’s just not true, and it’s becoming less and less true every day...Triggered emails are actually “review and renew” programs...You should review all your triggered emails at least quarterly to make sure images, links, rendering, and other functionality remains intact.” - Chad White, Research Director Litmus

“You’ll probably always have inactive subscribers. It’s simply human nature to lose interest over time. Don’t include the inactives with the actives. Instead, segment them out and market to them differently. First, define an “inactive.” For example, maybe it’s someone who hasn’t opened an email in over six months. Then create a segment and do a reactivation campaign for these unengaged subscribers. (And be willing to let go those who do not re-engage! They are dead weight.)” - Marco Marini, Co-Founder ClickMail

Optimize at every stage.

“If you really want to write the best email subject lines you have to learn from your mistakes. There is a whole raft of email tracking software readily available that you can download and use to optimise your emailing habits. There is no good reason not to do this. Collecting solid information on which email subject lines are opened the most, what devices your leads are using to read your emails and what time of day they open them is invaluable data that simply was not available to salespeople a few years ago. Try a few out and find out what works best for your business and your clients.” - Craig Rosenberg, Co-Founder TOPO

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“I’m proposing a new “Golden Rule” of email list management: Email unto others as you would have emailed unto you. If you were a prospect, would you be okay with receiving that email? It’s a simple, quick rule that can help you make a quick decision in any situation.” - Skyler Holobach, Email Compliance Manager Pardot

Follow email marketing best practices.

“Your subscribers shouldn’t have to zoom in to read your message, so use large fonts. We recommend using a minimum size of 14px for body copy and 22px for headlines. Keeping text at least 14px will avoid broken navigation bars and other layout elements on iOS, which automatically resizes small copy to a minimum of 13px.” - Lauren Smith, Marketing Coordinator Litmus

“At Pardot, we subscribe to a best practice called Multi-part MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions). Multi-part MIME bundles together a plain text and HTML version of an email, so that if an HTML email doesn’t load, the plain text version will display in its place. Similarly, if a recipient has indicated in their preferences that they only want to receive plain text emails (some people do still prefer them), that’s exactly what they’ll get.” - Jenna Hanington, Senior Content Strategist Pardot

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30“Optimize preview text, which is supported in web-based and mobile Gmail apps. This copy is pulled from the body of your email and shown after the subject line in the inbox. It’s a great way to reinforce the great content in your email and get subscribers to open.” - Justine Jordan, VP of Marketing Litmus

“Most marketers are always looking to increase their email open rates and click-through rates. Using videos in your emails can help you do just that. Our customer, BambooHR, reported seeing their highest open rates when they used the word “video” in their email subject lines. And our own research has shown a 25% increase in CTR when the email contains a video thumbnail as the CTA. For reference, we advise using a video thumbnail image that redirects to the video online, rather than embedding a video directly in the email. This is for two reasons: first, sharing videos via email can cause it to be marked as spam, and second, sharing video in an email will yield no data on how that video is performing or who is watching. Instead, embed the video on your page or landing page, and direct people there when they click on the video thumbnail image.” - Kristen Craft, Director of Business Development Wistia

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Over the past few years, quality content and search engine optimization (SEO) have become more and more intertwined. While optimizing your website content used to be a matter of placing a few carefully-curated keywords at critical points within your content, changes to search algorithms and buyer preferences now mandate that the highest quality content gets rewarded in search results, not just the content with the highest keyword density.

However, not all traffic is created equal. As organic reach spikes and wanes, many companies are turning to search engine marketing, or paid online advertising, to increase their brand awareness and bring new traffic to their website content.

Many marketers are hesitant to implement a full-blown SEO and SEM strategy due to the number of variables that must be taken into account, including budget, content creation, advertisements, landing pages, and forms. But when 91.5% of all search traffic goes to the sites listed on the first Google search results page, tabling an integrated search strategy for later can actually be detrimental to your success (Chikita Insights).

Fortunately, we’ve pulled together a few quotes from some of the best minds in the SEO and SEM industries to help you get started.

Step up Your SEO & SEM Strategy

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“Make sure you provide sufficient information to a visitor, or a quality rater, that can answer simple questions about your site. Is the author reputable? Does the site have authority? Should people consider the site trustworthy? And don’t forget to include things like a simple contact form. Your site should reflect E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.” - Jennifer Slegg, Founder and Editor The SEM Post

Be the authority.

“There’s no doubt that content strategy is still important and that your content must be the best search result anyone can find, but just because you have great content doesn’t guarantee you anything. As we continue to lose the ability to organically reach an audience on search and social, as technology increases the opportunity for people to block advertisements, and as avenues for connecting with customers increasingly become more digital, we must build brands so compelling and human that they transcend technology. We must become so real and relatable and true and trustworthy that customers don’t wait for you to come to them, they go looking for you.” - Mackenzie Fogelson, Founder and CEO Mack Web

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“If you want to make money on AdWords, your customers need to have a consistent and compelling experience from keyword to ad copy to landing page. To create this experience, you need to get granular. You need to dial in to the search intent of your target audience and then match your keywords, ad copy, and landing pages to that intent.” - Jacob Baadsgaard, CEO Disruptive Advertising

“Scroll maps are a great way to test whether the fold is relevant to the people viewing your landing page or website. Are people even scrolling far enough to see the important content or to take the action you want them to take? Often you’ll find that the fold isn’t a big concern—people aren’t afraid to scroll. But sometimes you’ll be shocked by the behavior on your pages.” - Oli Gardner, Co-Founder Unbounce

Create seamless user experiences.

“It’s important to understand where and what someone is doing when they come across your ad. For most of us in the B2B space, they’re not doing something that makes them inclined to whip out a credit card and start a trial. They’re reading blog posts or looking at Facebook. They’re not looking to be sold anything.” - Brennan Dunn, Founder Planscope

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“As you’re mapping out your online marketing strategy, use your marketing automation tool as a data source to develop targeted marketing campaigns based on customer profile and activity history. Determine which profile segments are interacting with which online assets, and which are the most effective channels and tactics for each. We find that this gets us an appropriate mix of marketing touchpoints for each audience profile, and avoids prospects becoming frustrated with generic messaging. Your data-driven insights will get the right message to the right audience — if you listen to them.” - Christina Serio, Senior Manager Corporate Marketing, Quantcast

Be the buyer.

“Forget “link building” and start “relationships” with your market and key influencers in your market. Search on Google, Bing, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Google+ to find key influencers in your market and start building relationships with them. Treat it like a typical networking scenario. Talk about how you can help each other and each others’ customers rather than emailing hundreds of strangers per day and asking them to link to your website. Much like the offline world, networking is one of the biggest keys to success in SEO today.” - Eric Covino, President Creative Signals

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“When you’re writing content — for your website, emails, ads, etc. — it’s always best to think of your end user and what problems they’re having and how to solve them. If you’re not sure what kinds of questions or problems they may be having, a great place to look for clues is review sites. You’ll find what customers are saying about your products, areas where they’re having challenges, and a lot of opportunities. There’s a gold mine of information, it’s worth taking a look!” - Katie Blair, Sr. Manager Online Marketing Pardot

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“B2B buyers tend to do a lot of comparison shopping, especially if we’re talking about expensive purchases, long-term contracts, and possible ongoing relationships. Thus, you need to provide a lot of buyer-oriented information, like case studies and white papers, in your PPC campaigns, as opposed to the “hot deals” that drive immediate transactions in the B2C world.” - Brad McMillen, Principal Mac Strat

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“There are a number of major platforms for amplifying headlines, and social networks are increasingly becoming great arenas for paid content promotion. Additionally, as these social networks get more saturated, the organic reach of brand content will continue to decrease. Our analysis shows that paid social media distribution is now a more cost-effective strategy for content marketing than building organic social audiences.” - Shane Snow, CCO Contently

Invest in a paid strategy.

“SEM and SEO go hand in hand. Bidding on a wide range of keywords allows you to utilize data to determine what converts and will be the most profitable for your company. This way you can put your SEO efforts into ranking for the keywords that will ultimately provide you the most value while not wasting resources on those that will not.” - Bob Dinsmore, Online Marketing Manager Salesforce

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44“The vast majority of people who see your landing page will neither sign-up for a free trial, opt-in or directly purchase your product... however, not all is lost. There is a way to follow up with prospects who have already seen your page. This is called “retargeting”. It works like this: a user hits your page and is tagged with a piece of code (called a cookie). That cookie allows you to follow them around and serve them ads on other websites. Some people call them “stalker ads.” It might seem a bit creepy, but it works.” - Mike Colella, Founder Adbeat

4342“While retargeting has been used for years to power website lead generation, including content downloads, demos, and free trials, it’s also equally great for branding. Keeping your story and solution in front of a user during a six-month sales cycle can be the extra reminder to help seal the deal.” - Lauren Vaccarello, VP of Marketing Box

“While I do believe that Facebook and Twitter have come a long way with their targeting and social advertising capabilities for B2B, I think LinkedIn is still more relevant for B2B marketers for one reason: A larger chance of targeting your audience. Without the distractions Facebook or Twitter brings along, LinkedIn offers a better platform on which to engage with the right prospects. This is extremely important since you obviously want a more focused approach in your campaigns when you’re spending money.” - Daniel Newman, President Broadsuite Media group

Use retargeting to stay top of mind.

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“Unfortunately, the default metric for display advertising tends to be click-through rate (CTR) or impressions — and these don’t tell us much about the impact our ads are having on engagement and education levels. Furthermore, given how few people actually click on ads, choosing CTR as a measurement seriously limits our ability to strategically execute campaigns. B2B marketers should be using display advertising to complement their marketing programs. The metrics they use should reflect that integration. Specifically, what’s the correlation between ads, website engagement and revenue?” - Rachel Balik, Sr. Manager Product Marketing Demandbase

Measure the right metrics.

If you’ve made it to the final chapter of our e-book, then you’ve reached the holy grail of B2B marketing: reporting on success. The challenge with reporting for many B2B organizations is the growing number of data sources that marketers are expected to analyze. In fact, according to Salesforce’s 2015 State of Analytics, there will be an 83% increase in analyzed data sources over the next five years alone.

Difficulties notwithstanding, 86% of B2B companies still consider analytics to be critical to marketing success (Regalix, 2015). With buyers controlling much of their own destinies, putting a strategy in place that can arm marketers with the right data at the right time is becoming more and more crucial to campaign success.

Take a look at the following chapter to see how the experts recommend tackling a reporting strategy, from choosing the right key performance indicators for your business to extracting meaningful insights from all of the data available to you.

Rev up Your Reporting

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“To understand the contribution of any marketing function, you need to have a documented understanding of successful outcomes. Is marketing expected to source pipeline, accelerate opportunities, or help retain customers? To what degree? Setting strategy requires tightly defining success in advance.” - Ross Graber, Senior Research Director, SiriusDecisions

“Different marketing functions play a different role in achieving marketing’s goals. Your PR team isn’t going to directly create revenue. But they can generate more reach into your target market by getting coverage placed on the most influential industry Web sites. The purpose of that greater reach could be to reduce the cost of your lead acquisition programs. Every function within marketing has things that they are expected to contribute; those need to be clearly defined.” - Ross Graber, Senior Research Director SiriusDecisions

Set expectations.

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“You need to focus your analytics efforts on questions that are important to the business where your confidence level in current answers is low. Only by focusing on areas where analytics can make a real difference can the investment in these capabilities deliver the benefits you are looking for.” - Kerry Cunningham, Research Director SiriusDecisions

“It turns out that how you handle KPIs can really affect your culture. Do you want to have an internally competitive culture? If so, create programs that emphasize the individual over the group. Do you want to have a team first culture? Then you use your KPIs in a different way to foster team efforts. I guess the most important thing is to be intentional, because it seems that either choice can create a great company. But have a culture intentionally.” - Bonnie Crater, VP of Marketing Full Circle

“If you are starting out with no baseline for measurement, begin with the basics. You need a basic understanding of what marketing is contributing to the bottom line, so your goals can be as simple as: hit a lead generation number (how many leads did I generate this quarter?); hit a revenue number (How much revenue was generated by marketing leads?); aim for a percentage increase/decrease (How can I increase conversion rates on landing pages by X%?); focus on an engagement metric (How engaged are your customers and prospects with your social media channels?).” - Sangram Vajre, CMO Terminus

“KPIs are Key Performance Indicators. Think about it as two schools of reporting: strategic and tactical. Your strategic reporting is going to be your KPIs — numbers that answer the ‘what’ questions of marketing: ‘What is my revenue goal?’ ‘What is my conversion rate?’ The other side of that is tactical reporting, which allows marketers to deep dive and optimize the entire funnel. So, more focused on answering the ‘how’ questions of marketing — ‘How do I optimize my landing pages?’ or ‘How do I optimize my SEM ads?” - Isaac Payne, Senior Operations Analyst Pardot

Identify your core key performance indicators.

Make sure marketing and sales are on the same page.

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“If you’re working at a B2B company, there’s a good chance that your sales reps live and breathe in their CRM. So one of the things that we really strive to do as a marketing team here is ensure that our VP of Marketing can communicate effectively with sales leadership within the system of record that our sales leadership is going to be looking at, so we have very specific custom data points that we are syncing with our instance of Salesforce. This is a great way to align teams; it’s also a great way to look at trends across the funnel, month over month, and dive into that tactical level of reporting as well.” - Isaac Payne, Senior Operations Analyst Pardot

“Organisations that have clarity around their lead management process see improvement in pipeline conversion rates, quality of leads, sales velocity, sales efficiency, productivity, utilisation and a measurable increase in marketing value (for both sourced and influenced leads). Very often, simply getting everyone around a table and working as a team to agree to a set of binding service-level agreements (SLAs) is the hardest step. A carefully planned and executed SLA and lead qualification workshop is a great way to ensure that all teams (and regions) get around the table to meet, discuss and formalise agreements on how lead criteria and actions will actually work.” - Chris Pharr, Consulting Director SiriusDecisions

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“Sure, there’s a ton of data on customers at every organization. Your job in marketing is not to analyze all of it. It’s to prioritize decisions and figure out where the path of least resistance lies to improve conversion, save costs, save time, and increase revenue. Pick one or two duties in your job and fix something. Anything, big or little. The practical reality is that you don’t have to analyze big data in marketing. You have to pick small samples and populations of data that can inform one or more decisions.” - Ian Michiels, Principal & CEO Gleanster Research

“Big Data gives marketers the most timely insights into who is interested or engaging with their product or content in real time. Tying buyer digital behavior into your CRM systems and marketing automation software allows you to track the topics that your buyers are most interested in and send them content that makes the most sense to develop those ideas or extrapolate on those topics.” - Jean Spencer, Global Content Marketing Strategist, Microsoft

“Do you know the number of prospects that are being added to your database? Generate this number on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis — whatever makes sense for the length of your sales cycle — to prove that your marketing campaigns are bringing in new prospects for nurturing and follow-up.” - Scott Armstrong, Co-Founder Brainrider

“Custom redirects allow you to track pretty much anything you want. By creating a shortened custom redirect, you can see how (and who) is interacting with your content regardless of where you place it. Use them to compare engagement levels for the same piece of content on several different marketing channels, or to contrast the relative success of several different calls to action — the possibilities are endless.” - Molly Hoffmeister, Product Marketing Manager, Pardot

Think tactically.

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Give meaning to the data.

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“It’s important to realize that there are no one-size-fits-all answers in analyzing marketing data – but there are directional and discernible trends. Always test assumptions. There are no magic insights you can derive from any form of analysis, even if you pay statisticians boatloads of money. Test, validate, and test again. You don’t have all the answers, but rather a process for uncovering the most informed decision. What you bring to the equation that is unique is your interpretation of the data and the actions you recommend for marketing optimization.” - Ian Michiels, Principal & CEO Gleanster Research

“Marketing is all about telling stories. Whether it’s building a great campaign to get more leads for your sales team or coming up with amazing branding and positioning for your products – telling a good story is at the core of all of this. More recently though people in marketing operations have begun telling stories with marketing data. How campaigns performed across different market segments, whether or not a company should continue spending on certain marketing programs, how sales works with marketing’s leads, etc. Data-driven insights like those tell the story of how your company’s marketing efforts are performing and how well aligned your company is.” - Josh Rosenberg, Marketing Manager Full Circle

“In the B2B marketing space, a clean CRM and database is critical. So it’s ‘junk in, junk out;’ you have to make sure that as you’re managing your data, that you’re staying on top of your CRM hygiene to collect the data that can be used later in terms of identifying different segments you can go after.” - Nate Young, Director of Demand Generation Kenshoo

ConclusionThe B2B marketers who are excelling in today’s buyer-driven world are the ones creating integrated marketing strategies that revolve around the full customer lifecycle. However, only 20% of B2B marketers are currently taking a customer lifecycle approach to their marketing strategy (Demand Metric).

As the quotes in this e-book can confirm, almost every aspect of B2B marketing — yes, even your reporting — revolves around building relationships. That’s why it’s so critical to position your company as a resource to your buyers at every stage of their journey, through content, email communications, and more. Top-performing companies take this one step further by analyzing which of their marketing campaigns are seeing the most engagement, and learning how to connect in a way that resonates.

While you’ve already read more than fifty quotes before landing on this final page, we would like to leave you with one final thought:

“Make the customer the hero of your story.”

Leave it to Ann Handley, the famed “Queen” of content marketing, to sum up the B2B marketer’s mission in only eight words.

If you’d like to learn more about building a complete B2B marketing strategy from start to finish — and gain access to exclusive worksheets, tip sheets, and checklists — take a look at our Complete Guide to B2B Marketing. With over eighty pages of content, you’ll find the best practices information you need to improve your content marketing, email marketing, lead generation, and more.

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Thank You! A huge thank you to our industry thought leaders for all of the wisdom we were able to share in this e-book! If you’re interested in learning more, take a look at the additional resources below.

• The Pardot Blog

• The Litmus Blog

• The Moz Blog

• The Salesforce Blog

• SiriusPerspectives

• Annhandley.com

• The Full Circle Insights Blog

• Convince & Convert Blog

• MarketingLand.com

• The Wordstream Blog

• The Brainrider Better B2B

Marketing Blog

• The Adroll Blog

• TopRank Online Marketing Blog

• The Wistia Blog

• The Content Strategist

• The Unbounce Blog

• Gleanster Insights Blog

• The KISSmetrics Blog

• The Planscope Blog

• The TechnologyAdvice Blog

• The Content Wrangler

• The Groove Blog

• The TOPO Blog

• DemandGen Report Blog

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THANK YOU!

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