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The regulators need to step in immediately to stop any contagion

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The liquidity facility will help avoid a one-off event snowballing into systemic risk

Argentina will keep pushing for talks with creditors even as a deadline for its $65 billion debt restructuring proposal passed on Friday with little sign it had the support needed from international bondholders to unlock a comprehensive deal.

Two more firms are eyeing a share of Reliance Industries Ltd's $65-billion digital unit Jio Platforms, according to Bloomberg News, setting them up to be a part of a growing list of firms that have recently invested in the Indian company.

As many parts of the world's biggest economy begin to reopen after weeks of stay-at-home orders that slowed the spread of the coronavirus but gutted jobs, Americans should not expect a quick return to growth, U.S. Federal Reserve officials said on Friday.

Alphabet Inc's Google said on Friday it has asked employees to take a day off on May 22, to address work-from-home-related burnout during the coronavirus pandemic.

A 5-year old boy has died in New York from a rare inflammatory syndrome believed to be linked to the novel coronavirus, highlighting a potential new risk for children in the pandemic, Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Friday.

The U.S. government reported more catastrophic economic fallout from the coronavirus crisis on Friday as the pandemic pierced the very walls of the White House and California gave the green light for its factories to restart after a seven-week lockdown.

China's banking and insurance regulator on Saturday issued draft rules on commercial banks' online lending business, banning the use of such loans for riskier investments and capping banks' online consumer credit, in a move to rein in financial risks.

Hackers linked to Iran have targeted staff at U.S. drugmaker Gilead Sciences Inc in recent weeks, according to publicly-available web archives reviewed by Reuters and three cybersecurity researchers, as the company races to deploy a treatment for the COVID-19 virus.

When people think of account-based marketing (ABM), they tend to think of it as a smaller-scale practice. Since ABM is fundamentally built around focus in the aligned pursuit of high-value accounts, it’s often associated with a significant reduction in target market scope (i.e., “Let’s narrow down to our 20-30 most promising accounts).

This itself is a constraint from which B2B marketers need to break free, which is why Gary Gerber stood out as a fitting guest for the first interview in our second season of Break Free B2B. At B2B Marketing Exchange in February, he sat with TopRank Marketing President Susan Misukanis to unpack what’s needed to bring ABM to the next level.

Gary and his team at Folloze helped Cisco develop a sophisticated and highly effective ABM program that targeted 20,000 customers through one-on-one, personalized content and messaging.

How can other B2B marketers achieve this level of scalability in their ABM efforts, overcoming one of the biggest remaining hurdles holding back this fast-growing approach? In large part it’s about rethinking our tools, Gary suggests, while leaning on a rather literal metaphor.

“You have to focus away from blunt instrument tools,” he says. “I’m not bashing blunt instruments, by the way, because a hammer is one of the most useful tools in your toolkit, but you wouldn’t use it to repair a watch. So you need to migrate to tools that let you [achieve] that kind of precision, because that’s the only way you’re going to build trust with your customers.”

[bctt tweet="“A hammer is one of the most useful tools in your toolkit, but you wouldn’t use it to repair a watch.” @Gary_Gerber of @Folloze on the need for more precision in #ABM. #BreakFreeB2B" username="toprank"]

Solutions like Folloze’s platform, which enables the delivery of personalized experiences at scale, are helping pave the way. But it’s not just about technology. Reaching a state of advanced ABM also requires shifts in organizational mindset, philosophy, and operation.

Gary and Susan cover the gamut in their 18-minute conversation. You can watch, listen, or find key excerpts and takeaways below.

Break Free B2B Interview with Gary Gerber

If you’re interested in checking out a particular portion of the discussion, you can find a quick general outline below, as well as a few excerpts that stood out to us.

• 1:30 - Recognizing that change is inevitable
• 2:30 - Where is ABM in terms of market maturity?
• 4:45 - Helping clients recognize shortcomings and make incremental progress
• 6:30 - Approaching the marketing funnel from an ABM standpoint
• 9:30 - Re-centering on the fundamentals of ABM targeting
• 11:15 - Where are you seeing successes in ABM?
• 13:15 - Optimizing for the future by taking the right steps right now
• 16:00 - Gary's personal hobbies and philosophies
• 17:15 - How can modern digital marketers break free?

Susan: What's your consulting approach? As marketers, we can't just tell our clients, "You're wrong, do it my way." How do you inch them toward making incremental progress?

Gary: It's an interesting question because when we talk to people, the tools that people are using are the same ones that worked well 10 or 15 years ago. People built their careers on tools like marketing automation and things like that. So it is challenging to tell them, "Those tools are blunt instruments by today's standards."

You have to focus the other way, on what's not working, on the pain. Because there is pain there, especially if they're under the gun for an account-based program, and for pushing things through the funnel, right? We like to talk about the three symptoms that marketers today are subject to: funnel starvation, pipeline constipation, and sales frustration. They can't get stuff into the top of the funnel anymore, whatever they get in the funnel doesn't come out, and they're under the gun there because sales and the entire organization is looking to them to move opportunities and it's not happening. So if you can put it in terms along those lines most marketers will eventually have to concede. 'Cause everyone's feeling that pain in B2B.

[bctt tweet="“We like to talk about the three symptoms that marketers today are subject to: funnel starvation, pipeline constipation, and sales frustration.” @Gary_Gerber @Folloze #BreakFreeB2B #ABM" username="toprank"]

Susan: Do you counsel equal focus on the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel to try to get things moving? Or is the first thing, you gotta fix the top of the funnel? What's your methodology?

Gary: Well, if you think about what ABM is, especially if you're doing it right, it's almost not a funnel mentality at all anymore, right? We refer to it as full cycle personalization, or some people are saying bow tie. If you're approaching it with that funnel mentality, you've almost doomed yourself to failure right from the start in 2020.

[bctt tweet="“If you're approaching #ABM with that funnel mentality, you've almost doomed yourself to failure right from the start in 2020.” @Gary_Gerber @Folloze #BreakFreeB2B" username="toprank"]

There’s an analogy others are using and I agree with it: it’s like a football team or a soccer team running down the field together. So the focus isn't on top of funnel or middle of funnel, it's on -- by definition -- the accounts themselves. And as sales and marketing are running down the field, they're bringing the account and the individuals together along with them. It's a journey.

And so how do you do that? You can't do that by sending them mass emails because everybody's getting that. Ultimately what it's about, and I've said this to other people, it's about building that relationship with them. More importantly, it's about building a relationship that's built on trust, not on hype. Because if you've built that trust and you're adding that value to them that they trust you're interested in their success, and you're providing information and content and messaging and whatever it is, that will help them be successful. They'll happily march down the field with you because you're adding to their success.

Susan: So let's talk about what's working in ABM these days. Where are smart modern marketers really experiencing some great progress from your perspective?

Gary: Most people think of ABM, as you mentioned before, as, "Well, I'm going to pick my top 20 accounts and I'm going to focus everything I got on them, and the rest of the 88,000 or whatever, oh well too bad, them we'll just spray and pray with a nurture campaign or something like that." And it's interesting because when you stop and think about it logically, limiting it to your 20 or 25 or whatever, that's a technical limitation, right? It's because I can't do what I want to do -- create a deeply personalized, individualized, valuable, trust building experience -- with more than those 20 people because there's me and this person, that's all that we can do.

But there is no procedural reason for that. If you could do [personalization] for everybody, then you would, but you can't. And so, Cisco is a really awesome example. What they've been able to do is actually automate a lot of what's manual to create these very individualized experiences where they’re getting content, and imagery, and messaging, and information, and everything that is very salient to them, that they used to have to build by hand, so it took hours for each … it’s automated, so they kind of wind it up once and this goes out. So Cisco is actually doing one of the largest ABM programs in the country.

Stay tuned to the TopRank Marketing Blog and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more Break Free B2B interviews. Here are a few interviews to whet your appetite:

• Break Free B2B Series: Jon Miller on How ABM Can Help Marketers Keep Their ‘Ship’ Together
• Break Free B2B Series: Hal Werner on the Intersection of Marketing Creativity and Analytics
• Break Free B2B Series: Adi Bachar-Reske on Taking the Lead in the Evolution of B2B Content Marketing

The post Break Free B2B Marketing: Gary Gerber on Scaling ABM without Losing Focus appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

How to use LinkedIn Ads’ new company targeting options to boost B2B lead generation
LinkedIn (client) recently rolled out additional targeting options for advertisers, allowing LinkedIn Ad users access to new Company Category B2B data comprised of Forbes, Fortune and platform data, along with the addition of growth rate targeting information. Search Engine Land

Report: Majority of B2B Marketers to Continue Investment in Data Quality in 2020
75 percent of B2B marketers plan to up their investment in data quality during 2020, while 90 percent said they view such investment leading to improved marketing and sales performance — two of the numerous findings of interest to digital marketers contained in recently-released Dun & Bradstreet report data. Chief Marketer

How COVID-19 Is Impacting Marketing Budgets at Enterprise Companies
B2B marketers expect to shift investment primarily to virtual events (78%), web content (72%), webinars (67%) and social media (66%) because of the pandemic, according to recently-released April enterprise-level company survey data. MarketingProfs

How COVID-19 has changed social media engagement [Report]
Sprout Social’s new pandemic-era data shows that LinkedIn posts perform the best on Wednesdays at 3pm, Thursdays from 9-10am, and Friday from 11am to noon, and that the media and entertainment industry has been publishing almost 9 more posts daily, according to new social media engagement data on interest to marketers. Sprout Social

Twitter Publishes New Data on Video and Ad Content Performance During COVID-19
Twitter increased its monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) by 23 percent during the quarter, and saw video view rates that rose by 5.5 percent, two of the findings in newly-released brand COVID-19 trend data. Social Media Today

Facebook Adds New 'Animate' Option to Add Motion to Still Images in Facebook Stories
Facebook has released new zoom, pan and other animation modes that bring marketers a variety of additional Facebook Stories options, and has also begun testing several new mood-based content reaction options, the social media giant recently announced. Social Media Today

YouTube Influencer Engagement Rate Benchmarks: What Are Good Rates?
Various YouTube channel categories sport a wide range of differing engagement benchmarks, according to recently-released YouTube influencer engagement rate report data, which also reveals that micro-influencers on the video platform can often achieve high engagement marks. MarketingCharts

LinkedIn Publishes Data on Latest Content Engagement Trends on the Platform
LinkedIn has released new content trend engagement data, including a breakdown by global regions that shows what the platform’s audience is looking for and engaging with, with pandemic-related content having seen some of the biggest increases in quantity, the firm announced. Social Media Today

Coronavirus reshapes consumer habits, creating 4 new segments, report finds
25 percent of consumers said they would pay more to buy from trusted brands and 23 percent from ethical brands — two of numerous findings of interest to digital marketers in newly-released Ernst & Young pandemic marketing report data. Marketing Dive

Facebook Outlines a Range of New Video Tools, Including Messenger Rooms for Group Video Hangouts
Facebook recently announced a variety of video-related updates to its numerous social communications properties, including a change which will allow up to 8 people to have WhatsApp video calls, while Messenger video received new virtual background options, among several other video feature updates. Social Media Today

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE:

A lighthearted look at our brand promise by Marketoonist Tom Fishburne — Marketoonist

Chiquita lets Spotify users unlock music playlists, branded prizes — Mobile Marketer

TOPRANK MARKETING & CLIENTS IN THE NEWS:

• Lee Odden — 10 Expert Tips for Marketing During a Crisis — Oracle (client)
• Lee Odden — 4 takeaways for content marketers in the time of COVID-19 — Search Engine Land
• Lee Odden — 5 Hours of Content Marketing - Break Free of Boring B2B with Influential Content Experiences — SEMrush

Have you got your own top B2B content marketing or digital advertising stories from the past week of news? Please let us know in the comments below.

Thanks for taking time to join us, and we hope you will join us again next Friday for more of the most relevant B2B and digital marketing industry news. In the meantime, you can follow us at @toprank on Twitter for even more timely daily news. Also, don't miss the full video summary on our TopRank Marketing TV YouTube Channel.

The post B2B Marketing News: B2B Marketers Invest in Data Quality, Top Times to Post During Pandemic, LinkedIn’s Engagement Trends, & Facebook’s Video Updates appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

What do we mean when we talk about a transformation in marketing?

Let me put it this way. The switch from horses to cars was a transformation. It was a fundamental rethinking of the way that humans move. We went from, “Find an animal that can go further and faster than you can and ride on it,” to “Burn fuel and use the energy to turn a motor that transfers the power to wheels.”

Every improvement since then — from V8 engines to power steering — has just been an iteration on the theme. A little faster, a little more efficient, a little safer, but iteration, not transformation.

Marketers are fantastic at iteration. It’s part of the job! We’re great at A/B testing, optimization, and continuous improvement. But at the heart of it, a lot of us are still working with a souped-up version of the same old tactics we’ve always used. Yes, we’ve gone digital. Yes, we’ve automated X and Y and we’re on Z and W channels. But we’re not inventing the engine; we’re just breeding faster horses.

That’s why I get excited when I see something genuinely novel in our profession. And Lisa Sharapata and her colleagues at 6sense have the goods. 

We had the privilege of interviewing Lisa during B2BMX, and she discussed some big ideas that we’re still wrapping our heads around. The death of the MQL. The “dark funnel.” It’s nothing less than a fundamental rethinking of the theory and practice of marketing, one that brings together sales and marketing and refocuses both around revenue.

[bctt tweet="“When we say, ‘we're gonna give you this amount of pipeline, we're gonna generate this amount of revenue,’ and we can actually see it coming and help deliver it in a predictable way, they are never going to want to go back to a #MQL again.” -Lisa Sharapata, @6senseinc" username="toprank"]

You can watch our full interview with Lisa below, or listen to the podcast version (and don’t forget to subscribe). Scroll down past the embeds for a few highlights from the conversation.

Break Free B2B Interview with Lisa Sharapata

Timeline and Highlights

1:00 Account engagement platforms and the dark funnel

4:30 The role of the BDR for inbound marketing

6:00 Sales and marketing: Together at last

7:15 Content strategy & SEO in dynamic marketing

10:15 Engagement is the new oil, but are we ready to drill?

15:30 The end of MQLs

Lisa: We'll create a segment based on our ICP, our ideal customer profile and keywords, depending on how we want to set it up, what they're searching for, what stage they're in. 

We have multiple different campaigns running all the time and it's dynamic, so we're seeing what these groups are searching. And they're in consideration right now, so we're gonna run this type of content and this type of display to them. 

And then lo and behold, they're starting to engage. More and more people are engaging, more of them have come to our website, they're now familiar with us, so we're gonna change up the content. And it's all dynamic and running based on how we've set the segments up to run and what content we've set up to target those accounts. 

So it moves dynamically, as they shift what they're doing, we can do all that from our platform. And then on the flip side this all feeds into Salesforce and you see this, basically this map and timeline of everything that's happening. We have a persona map that fills out this grid and you can see in your targets who's doing what, green, yellow, red, who's engaged who's not, who do you need to engage, who clicked on what, when, what keyword did they search for, what brought them to your website, what pages did they go to. 

You can look at all this information, but then it's also aggregating that and turning it into data that you can use to say, "Here's the next best action, here's someone in that account that is probably a key decision-maker, that you should buy their contact information". So it's like this whole 360 of what you do with that account.

Susan: That's awesome. Okay so the technology is obviously extremely strong, but it can't be done without humans.

Lisa: very true, very true. Like you can see my I love BDR t-shirt, we actually declared this week BDR appreciation week. I kind of started from the marketing background because that's my background, but a salesperson comes in, they have a dashboard in the morning telling them here's the accounts that are hot, here's the ones that are engaging, here's the ones that you should go after today and here's now what you should do and it breaks it down into next best actions.

And typically that would be a BDR or SDR role, that needs to figure out "Okay, I'm gonna make a video for them and send them as email, what should I talk to them about? Okay they were searching these keywords, so they must be interested and have this problem, here's how I can offer value." 

Instead of just the shot in the dark like guessing, hoping that they're saying the right thing, or just spraying as many emails out there, phone calls as they can make in a day. We're getting really strategic and helping them and it takes all the legwork out too, like they don't have to spend thirds of their day doing research, it cuts that way down so that they have it all their fingertips and then they can just start taking action when they come in in the morning.

Susan: so then do the BDR's love marketing? 

Lisa: So, I have never in my career, been in an organization where sales and marketing work hand in hand, I mean it's truly a night and day difference, because first of all we agree on "Here's the best accounts", because you can see what they're doing in the dark funnel, you know they are in my ideal customer profile but they're also in market. They're in market, before they even come inbound, we know they're in market. So sales loves marketing and marketing loves sales, because we are working together toward the same goal now.

Susan: Okay can we get back to the MQL's? Because you have declared 2020 as the year of no MQL's, so to sales execs, senior execs that sometimes can mean no accountability. 

Lisa: Yeah, so I mean here's the thing: If you talk to most sales execs and you ask them "How valuable do you think the MQL's really are?" and "How often do they turn into an SQL?" and “When marketing says they're gonna give you this many MQL's, how meaningful is that truly to you?" Most of the time they're like "Yeah, marketing is gonna throw these scans from their event over the fence and tell us to work on them." 

And they don't really put a lot of value in them. But when we say we're gonna give you this amount of pipeline, we're gonna generate this amount of revenue, and we can start to show that predictability, in saying this is what of your accounts are in market right now, that is worth this amount of pipeline to you and we can actually see it coming and help deliver it in a predictable way.. I'll tell you what, they are never going to want to go back to a MQL again. 

Stay tuned to the TopRank Marketing Blog and subscribe to our YouTube channel for more Break Free B2B interviews. Here are a few interviews to whet your appetite:

• Break Free B2B Marketing: Enterprise-Level ABM with Oracle’s Kelvin Gee
• Break Free B2B Marketing: Gary Gerber on Scaling ABM without Losing Focus
• Break Free B2B Series: Jon Miller on How ABM Can Help Marketers Keep Their ‘Ship’ Together
• Break Free B2B Series: Adi Bachar-Reske on Taking the Lead in the Evolution of B2B Content Marketing

The post Break Free B2B Marketing: Lisa Sharapata of 6sense on the End of the MQL appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

B2B marketing is boring, doesn’t feature influencers, and uses only monotonous white papers and lifeless case studies — we’ve all heard these stereotypes, but what is the reality of B2B marketing in 2020?

The traditional image of dull B2B marketing has been turned on its head in recent years, and we wanted to explore 10 top myths and show how the state of B2B marketing has gone from bland to unforgettable.

Let’s dig in and break down the biggest B2B marketing myths, and look at how your brand can benefit from the new era of business marketing.

1 — B2B Marketing Goes From Boring-2-Boringest

The Myth:

The grand-daddy of all B2B marketing myths — dating back nearly to when the term business-to-business was coined — is the notion that it stands for boring-to-boring, with marketing about as exciting as forty shades of dreary gray.

The Myth-Buster:

As we’ll explore throughout this post, the B2B marketing of 2020 has left boring in the dust, replaced with exciting and truly memorable content experiences.

As the B2B marketing landscape continues progressing from its dusty Boring-To-Boring roots, business customers are expecting content and experiences that are increasingly similar to what B2C efforts have long provided.

Today’s B2B customers expect to find all of the relevant information they seek brought to life through an online interface that’s not only easy to search and navigate, but one that’s also chock full of interactive and story-rich user experience features that make interacting an entertaining experience, such as our “Laser Bear.”

Click Here to see the Break Free from Boring B2B Guide in Full Screen Mode

[bctt tweet="“Tell the truth, but make the truth fascinating. You know you can’t bore people into buying your product, you can only interest them into buying it.” — David Ogilvy" username="toprank"]

2 — B2B Marketing Doesn’t Use the Cool Social Media Platforms

The Myth:

You won’t find B2B brands actively sharing content and interacting on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest, Twitch, or other fun and fresh social media platforms.

The Myth-Buster:

Fortune 500 firms regularly now have social media presences on fashionable social channels such as Giphy, Snapchat, and even Facebook Horizons — the social media giant’s foray into the virtual reality (VR) world — all gaining new B2B brands at a faster pace than you might imagine.

Our senior content marketing manager Joshua Nite recently took a look at “6 Unconventional Social Channels for B2B Marketing,” showing how B2B brands can gain a competitive edge by adopting unconventional social channels.

Out client Dell Technologies offers a fine example of how B2B brands are embracing nontraditional social channels, with its Dell Technologies Giphy page.

via GIPHY

Despite using social media more than any other demographic, Gen Z is most at home not on traditional mainstream social platforms but increasingly on gaming platforms, according to recent Kantar study data, which showed that 90 percent of the demographic use gaming platforms to serve roles similar to those social media does for some 59 percent of the general population.

To learn more, we’ve also looked at how B2B brands are successfully using various social media platforms:

• 5 Top B2B Brands Mastering Facebook Engagement
• 5 Top B2B Brands Delivering Exemplary Twitter Engagement
• 5 Top B2B Brands Maximizing LinkedIn Engagement
• How 5 B2B Brands Are Using Snapchat and Instagram Stories

[bctt tweet="“B2B marketers should be exploring any channel where their audience is. While it’s easy to feel like the more younger-skewing platforms are optional, we ignore them at our peril.” — Joshua Nite @NiteWrites" username="toprank"]

3 — B2B Marketing Doesn’t Relate to Real People & Their Stories

The Myth:

B2B marketing isn’t about me or my real challenges, and never even attempts to appeal to people like me — instead it just continues to put forth insincere messages targeting people who don’t exist in the real world.

The Myth-Buster:

Telling real stories about actual people has catapulted B2B influencer marketing to the forefront of business marketing success, while B2B marketing in general has also continued to embrace the importance of storytelling.

We’ve set out to tell the intriguing stories of many top B2B marketers in our Break Free B2B video interview series, to date featuring 23 industry professionals such as Amisha Gandhi of client SAP Ariba and Kelvin Gee of client Oracle,  sharing their insights and passions.

Some, such as Eaton’s director of corporate marketing Zari Venhaus have explored the importance of storytelling.

Another benefit of telling the stories of real people in B2B industries is that it lends itself well to the creation of episodic content, as our senior content strategist Nick Nelson explored in “Hungry for More: What B2B Marketers Need to Know About Episodic Content.”

Additional takes on how storytelling benefits B2B marketers are available in our following related articles:

• Once Upon a Time: Storytelling in Today’s B2B Content Marketing Landscape
• Be Like Honest Abe: How Content Marketers Can Build Trust Through Storytelling
• You Have 8 Seconds – GO! Brand Messaging Secrets With Debra Jasper at #Pubcon

[bctt tweet="“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller.” — Steve Jobs" username="toprank"]

4 — B2B Marketing Never Gets Heard, or If it Does It’s Quickly Ignored and Forgotten

The Myth:

B2B marketing is just wasted effort, since nobody ever really reads it or pays any attention to its boring business-suit-and-briefcase imagery. Who would ever remember a B2B advertising message, anyway?

The Myth-Buster:

Study after study continues to show that real emotion makes us remember digital content and messaging, and smart B2B marketing has grown significantly in its use of the kind of authentic storytelling that people will remember.

The most-shared ads during the last Olympics were all loaded with hard-hitting emotion from brands like Panasonic and Apple, and the Super Bowl perennially features similarly emotion-packed spots from brands like Google and Microsoft.

[bctt tweet="“Stories are just data with a soul.” @BreneBrown" username="toprank"]

5 — B2B Marketing is For Stodgy Old People

The Myth:

B2B marketing is for stodgy old fuddy-duddies, and has no relevance for anyone under 40 or 50.

The Myth-Buster:

B2B marketers freshly out of college are having tremendous impact in today’s professional brand messaging, and are bringing with them their younger takes on B2B marketing, which will increasingly drive the industry.

Thanks in large part to the successful inroads B2B influencer marketing have made for brands looking to reach younger audiences, when an influencer recommends a product, 51 percent of Millennials say they are more likely to try it, according to research data from Valassis and Kantar.

Gen Z and Millennial B2B marketers who have grown up with newer social media platforms are occupying ever-more positions of power all the way up to corporate marketing management — a move that has helped today's B2B marketing look decidedly different from that of even five years ago.

Snapchat recently published a study exploring brand expectations among Gen Z, finding that 82 percent of the demographic want brands to act on customer feedback, while a similar report from Campaign Monitor also found Gen Z's social media platform preferences to differ from those of older generations.

[bctt tweet="“The B2B marketing of 2020 has left boring in the dust, replaced with exciting and truly memorable content experiences.” — Lane R. Ellis @lanerellis" username="toprank"]

6 — B2B Marketing Should Never Include Interactive or Experiential Content

The Myth:

B2B audiences don’t expect or even want interactive or experiential content when it comes to brand messaging — they want only dense black-and-white case studies of at least 200 pages, or white papers filled with serious professional business information.

The Myth-Buster:

B2B audiences have been starved for interactive and experiential content for far too long, and in recent years have come to expect much more B2C-like digital experiences which incorporate truly entertaining, memorable, and interactive elements.

With 98 percent of consumers more likely to make a purchase after an experience (Limelight), and 77 percent having chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that delivers a personalized service or experience (Forrester), more B2B marketers have begun to use experiential content.

In 2020 experiential content comes in many forms, with just a few examples being:

• Virtual Reality (VR)
• Augmented Reality (AR)
• Cloud-Based Digital Assets from Ceros and Other Platforms
• Quizzes and Polls
• Interactive Flipbooks and eBooks

Experiential content is also intertwined with both storytelling and customer experience (CX), together becoming an extremely powerful triptych of B2B marketing strategy.

You can take a closer look at the growing field of B2B experiential marketing here:

• What B2B Marketers Need to Know About Experiential Content
• The B2B Marketer’s Journey To Experiential Content at #B2BMX
• Break Free B2B Marketing: Sruthi Kumar on Creating Memorable Experiences
• 31 DIY Marketing Tools To Create Remarkable Experiences
• Top 10 B2B Digital Marketing Trends in 2020

[bctt tweet="“Experiential content makes us a central part of a story, and not just a passive subject receiving a one-way brand message.” — Lane R. Ellis @lanerellis" username="toprank"]

7 — B2B Marketing Doesn’t Have Influencers

The Myth:

Influencers don’t exist in B2B marketing, because they are only for hawking cosmetics and pushing designer clothing lines on Instagram — what relevance could influencers really have in the professional B2B world?

The Myth-Buster:

Influencer marketing in the business world has never been more vibrant and thriving, especially the kind of always-on B2B influencer marketing our CEO Lee Odden has explored in articles including “Always On Influence: Definition and Why B2B Brands Need it to Succeed.”

Influencer marketing will see global brand spending up to $15 billion by 2022 (Business Insider Intelligence), and with more people using social media and spending greater amounts of time doing so, B2B influencers have a bigger audience than ever.

This may explain why influencers are seeing rising engagements with a variety of firms, as even the World Health Organization recently worked with influencers for its latest “Safe Hands Challenge” hand-washing campaign.

B2C and B2B influencer marketing are undoubtedly very different – and ever-evolving – undertakings, as we recently explored in “B2C vs. B2B Influencer Marketing – What’s the Difference?”

[bctt tweet="“The output of B2B influencer collaboration can be in any form that the brand is currently publishing content: text, video, visual, audio, interactive and even VR.” @LeeOdden" username="toprank"]

Learn more about B2B influencer marketing with these insightful looks at how brands are using it to achieve success, and dig in to recent influencer marketing statistics here:

• Four Ways to Optimize the Marketing Performance of a B2B Influencer Program
• 24 Essential B2B Influencer Marketing Statistics
• How B2B Influencer Marketing Offers Brands an Ideal Alternative to In-Person Events
• Jumpstarting a Pilot B2B Influencer Marketing Program in 5 Steps
• 5 Key Traits of the Best B2B Influencers

8 — B2B Marketing is Pointless & Impossible For Brands Than Aren’t Billion-Dollar Firms

The Myth:

B2B marketing is only for billion-dollar mega-corporations looking to attract other massive Fortune 500 firms — and it doesn’t have any relevance for a company with less than 10,000 employees.

The Myth-Buster:

It doesn’t take billion-dollar firms to create priceless B2B marketing efforts. Indeed, some of the most successful and memorable B2B marketing campaigns are coming from small-to-midsize firms, especially those that are using B2B influencer marketing.

Our content strategist Anne Leuman recently took a look at “5 Examples of Effective B2B Content Marketing in Times of Crisis,” featuring several smaller firms including HealthcareSource and our client monday.com, showing how they are putting out timely and helpful marketing messages during the pandemic.

Social media and influencer marketing have helped level the playing field not only among large B2C and B2B firms, but smaller B2B businesses as well.

Being savvy and nimble can propel a business a long way in the B2B marketing world — perhaps even over land and water, as Shakespeare once noted.

[bctt tweet="“Nimble thought can jump both sea and land.” — William Shakespeare" username="toprank"]

9 — B2B Marketing Isn’t Even Well-Suited for Social Media

The Myth:

B2B marketers shouldn’t even use social media, since business audiences don’t use social platforms, or if they do, they’re not there to find serious B2B information.

The Myth-Buster:

Nearly everyone uses social media in 2020, with global active social media users topping the 3.8 billion mark recently, and that includes almost all the business professionals in every B2B industry.

Social media and B2B marketing go hand-in-hand these days, and smart marketers recognize the importance of this intertwined system, and work hard to inform and delight on every social channel where their brand's customers are actively engaging.

[bctt tweet="“It doesn’t take billion-dollar firms to create priceless B2B marketing efforts.” — Lane R. Ellis @lanerellis" username="toprank"]

10 — B2B Marketing’s Only Real Channel is LinkedIn

The Myth:

LinkedIn is the only social media platform B2B marketers ever need to use, because it’s the only one those in B2B industries ever really utilize.

The Myth-Buster:

While it’s true that LinkedIn is the top social media platform for B2B marketers and professionals in general, and still represents the go-to source for business information when it comes to social — and we’re not just saying that because they are a TopRank Marketing client — if you’re limiting your efforts solely to LinkedIn you’re missing out on key industry players who happen to spend the majority of their social media time on other platforms.

As we've shown above, there are a wide array of social media channels B2B marketers are finding vital to their brand efforts. With every Fortune 500 firm now represented on LinkedIn, however, it's a platform that should be included in every B2B marketer's mix.

Soar Beyond B2B Myths With Powerful Marketing Tactics

Now that we've made an effort to dispel these 10 common B2B marketing myths, we hope that you'll be better able to power your next marketing campaign using the tactics we've looked at, and create B2B content that inspires and enchants while also providing best-answer solutions.

The post B2B Marketing Mythbusters: Dispelling 10 Common Myths with Extraordinary Marketing appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

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