The Future of B2B Marketing
There’s a massive shift happening in marketing, perhaps you’ve felt it.
👉 Outbound sales is dead
👉 SEO is dead
👉 Social is dead
👉 Lead gen is dead
Many B2B brands are struggling right now. They are desperate and in need of something that works consistently, efficiently, and is immediate.
The brands that are able to survive the long winter are those who have planted seeds in early spring.
What does this mean?
Branding is the one thing that has endured the test of time. Having a strong market presence will attract customers to you so you don’t have to rely so much on inefficient spend to acquire them.
But make no mistake, branding takes a long time, it’s impossible to measure, and it’s expensive.
Think of it as an investment.
As with any investment, you will not likely reap what you sow this week or next month, but at some future state.
Branding is not sales, branding is all about making future sales easier.
Most brands don’t have the financial runway to wait around for their branding efforts to take off.
With the rising cost of everything (staff, paid media, influencers…), and the fewer closed-won deals, it may be tempting (or a necessity) to layoff staff and have AI replace them.
In its current form, AI can help, but it cannot replace.
If you’re over-indexed on AI content, you’re most likely circling the drain, and you don’t even know it.
So what do you do?
You get creative, you get scrappy, you think outside the box.
I cannot layout an exact playbook for you to follow because it will be different for every company.
If you need help with creative strategy or brand building, DM me and let’s have a conversation. Often fresh eyes, and someone with lots of external experience, can guide you through the storm better than your internal team who have been punched in the gut the last 3 years and have low morale.
Don’t give up, there’s hope!
Strategies for Improving Your Content Marketing
Too often B2B companies create content and just post it on their company page. But it hardly ever reaches their audience organically.
To overcome this, I would suggest:
Social media – have staff, especially the CEO, post on their social pages, and also post in groups where your audience hangs out.
I posted something about SEO once on my LinkedIn page and it got 200 impressions and 1 like. That’s because my LinkedIn connections don’t care about SEO as much as I do. I posted that same post in a marketing group and it got 10,000+ impressions, hundreds of comments and likes, new connection requests…
Also, just because you post it once, it doesn’t mean you can post it again. You can reschedule it, change the title, change the feature graphic, etc.
I called this the three Rs of Content – Reuse, Remix, and Repurpose.
Paid promotion – put a little ad spend behind it and target it to your audience. It doesn’t have to be much, $20 – $100 per post can often be enough to guarantee it’ll be put in front of the right people. Again, going back to what I first said – is it something the audience would care about? Does it have an engaging title? Does the cover art looking interesting and appealing? Lots to consider here.
Too often when companies hit publish, they move onto the next one, and hope and pray that their post will organically take on a life of its own and go off into the world and do what it needs to do.
Sadly, this is rarely the case.
Once you hit publish, that content should go in a spreadsheet and you should set some time aside every month to monitor what each post did in terms of impressions, engagement, and so on. There are many other things you need to do as well such as uploading it to Google Search Console, SEO optimization, rescheduling, A/B testing, and planning what happens next.
Repurposing content is huge – can we turn this thing into something else (or better yet, 10 other things)? Could it be a video, or a podcast topic, or a webinar, or an infographic, or can we post it on Medium or LinkedIn Pulse, or create social posts from it…? Essentially you want to tailor your content for each platform, considering the format and style.
Partnerships and Collaborations can be a great way to amplify content – they can post it on their channels and you could do the same for theirs. Partners are those who share a common audience but are not competitors.
Newsletters can be a great way to distribute content, but too often companies neglect the most important part – collecting emails. There is a whole strategic initiative in and of itself with this, which I won’t go into.
In terms of long form video content, that needs to be chopped up into smaller clips for Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok videos. There is a whole methodology here.
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