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27 Marketing Lessons B2B Marketers Should Know

 

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This week the MarketingProfs B2B Forum was held in Boston. The event brought together B2B marketers from all industries to share best practices and case studies. Most of the content at this year's conference focused on online marketing, particularly social media, but other aspects of B2B marketing such as event marketing and lead management were also well represented.

The event closed with a recap of some of the best lessons from the conference. For this post, I took some lessons from that list and added some of my own. If you couldn't be at this year's event, here are the most important lessons for B2B marketers

27 Marketing Lessons B2B Marketing Should Know

1. Pay attention to the keywords you are using in social status updates. Make is easy for prospects to find your social content by using the right keywords.

2. Content is precious. Repackage existing content into different formats, such as blog posts, podcasts and webinars to drive more leads.

3. Marketers are publishers.

4. Use anchor text correctly across blogs and social networks to maximize SEO effectiveness.

5. When testing email marketing, have a clear reason as to why your are conducting the test.

6. Listen to your sales team for the type of content that generates the best leads, and optimize your content strategy to create it.

7. Don't stop marketing efforts that are working to start social media; instead, use social media to support those activities.

8. List marketing messages from your business and your competitors; then remove the company names. Can you tell which message connects to each company, or do they all sound the same?

9. Social media thought leadership is built by empowering employees to talk about your company and industry.

10. Use a corporate SlideShare account to share updated company documents using employee LinkedIn profiles. This can be done by asking employees to add the SlideShare application to their LinkedIn profiles and then connecting their profiles to the corporate Slideshare account.

11. Find and create online marketing best practices for your industry by examining what competitors and other industries are doing.

12. Almost all online content has the opportunity to be optimized for search. 

13. Prospects will let you know when they no longer need nurturing.

14. Set and identify goals for different inbound marketing strategies to stay in the right direction during tactical execution.

15. Solve problems for customers, and leverage marketing to demonstrate these solutions.

16. Measure the data that is important to your business. Don't try to measure everything.

17. Review old blog posts and update calls-to-action to link to new content. This is especially important for posts that receive a lot of search traffic.

18. Corporate blogs should strive to be the best trade magazine in their industry.

19. 20% of searches done in Google every day have never been done before. Create relevant content about your business even if people aren't looking for it yet.

20. Core marketing values and processes still matter in inbound marketing.

21. Email marketing is not enough.  Integrate marketing with multiple channels.

22. Mobile is an important emerging media platform for B2B companies.

23. Search is a major opportunity for qualified leads because customers are already looking for your product.

24. Optimize for all search engines. Some search engines may drive better quality leads than others.

25. The primary purpose of social content isn't to provide something for people to read. It's to provide something for them to discuss.

26. Tools and technology don't make your business more interesting or smarter.

27. Optimize landing pages to rank in organic search results.


As a B2B marketer, which of these lessons is the most relevant to your business?  Did you learn something?

 

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Posted by Kipp Bodnar on Thu, May 06, 2010 @ 02:00 PM

COMMENTS

Great list. I would add measure what's actionable and then act on what's measured. 
 
@portma

posted on Thursday, May 06, 2010 at 2:56 PM by Chris Clegg


propects was mistype in your first point! Ok, while all these are essential for successful marketing, webmasters don't look for instant rich solutions instead be willing to invest in a long-term strategy!

posted on Thursday, May 06, 2010 at 4:03 PM by Allen - Social Media Marketer


I agree, there are no more "Get to the top quick" SEO methods unless you are willing to pay for Adwords which is just too expensive. You do have to be in it for the long haul for climbing the results takes time. Be prepared for over a years worth of work just to get noticed and then you have to do a lot!

posted on Thursday, May 06, 2010 at 5:53 PM by Mike - Internet Solutions


Is a good brief of the topic.

posted on Friday, May 07, 2010 at 9:36 AM by Nicolas Vega


Fantastic summary. My list of B2B Marketing lessons from the <a>Marketing Profs conference appears here<a>.

posted on Saturday, May 08, 2010 at 7:10 PM by Barbara Bix


On your point #2, I'm a little confused. I know content should be repurposed, but I also know that identical blocks of copy within the same site can dilute your ranking, no? So if I post a press release in my press area and then I use a passage from that release (or a quote) on an article page, is that a problem? I'm nervous about having an article on the site and having a press release in the press area that could diminish the drawing power of the article. 
 
And, on a related note: If I send my press release to a distribution services (PRWeb, etc) and the release is posted online, does that site's page fight with the page in the press area of my site? The content is, after all, identical.  
 
Love to hear your opinion.

posted on Monday, May 17, 2010 at 12:18 PM by Steve Anderson


Steve, 
 
You don't want to post the same release on 5 different pages of your site, but it is ok to use the content from one document in different forms of content which content off of your site like an e-mail message.  
 
Anytime that you are posting the same content across multiple sites, the best practice is to include a link to the original article on your site to let Google understand.

posted on Monday, May 17, 2010 at 3:33 PM by Kipp Bodnar


Comments have been closed for this article.