5 lifehacks of inbound marketing in the b2b market that you are missing

1. Cannibalize your content

When we talk about content marketing, then robbing Peter to pay Paul, this is not the kind of thing that makes you lose your job. For this you can even be promoted. If looting and cannibalism are too strong metaphors for you, consider recycling content.

Direct all your marketing efforts to one content occasion at a time. When your specialists in social. media will make cool infographics, don't let it just disappear on your Facebook wall. Breathe in her new life and do the newsletter. Write a blog post on this topic.

Finally, make downloads that will be useful to customers.
SAP has shown us an excellent example of such tactics. They were able to create a complete set of marketing materials for 19 industries (including brochures, infographics, reviews, blogs, presentations, newsletters). All these materials are easily adapted and applied to any of the 19 industries.

2. Remember that you communicate with people, not with organizations.

When developing a marketing campaign, remember that although you are serving a business, you still appeal to a person, and sometimes to a group of people. In other words, they, as end users, expect a human relationship from you.
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Take the company Nextiva, which provides communications services based on cloud solutions. They work with small convenience stores as well as with major Fortune companies.

The company has found its star way to communicate with customers, which is difficult to apply, talking on the phone. They broke the foundations of the traditional b2b client service by starting to record personalized video messages.



“In our digital age, it is becoming more and more difficult to deal with customers face to face, and we found that our responses recorded on video eliminate this disadvantage,” said Nextiva video producer Max Andersen.

The company uses different videos - from simple answers for clients recorded on a webcam, to professionally made commercials with success stories, image clips and video instructions on the most frequent issues.

“In interactive communication, it’s important not only a personal appeal to the client, such an appeal also shows our respect for the client, emphasizes the importance of the client for the company,” said Max.

Initially, video clips were such an informal way to communicate with customers. Users could send their questions or requests for those. support. Nextiva experts recorded short video messages addressed directly to the client. Whenever possible, with a positive response, company employees showed the results of work done at the request of customers, while mentioning their names.

Even though the video was addressed to only one person, he said that “his request has such a serious impact on the company. And that the company is building a corporate culture that attracts customers even more. ”

3. Borrow ideas from colleagues with b2c

There is a cliché about b2c marketers that they have to invent some cool things all the time, while b2b marketers are working relaxed, relying on more humane tactics, now everything is changing.

A good example of borrowing from b2c shows us the book book wholesaler BookPal, they have found a way to increase sales by applying customer experience.

“We are constantly looking for ways to improve customer interaction,” said Tony Dikostanzo, President of Book Pal.

After an audit of the site and drawing up a portrait of consumers, Tony and his team decided to study the behavior of retail customers before making a complete redesign of the site.

“We decided to look at the experience of buying customers from other retailers and decided to make the design and functionality of our site look like the one they are used to using,” said Tony.



The analysis also took into account soc. media such as your own blog, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and even Snapchat, which they recently began to use to understand the possibilities of this site. “I think we are playing on the social field. media is more serious than other b2b retailers, ”Tony said.

Dikostanzo said that understanding how customers use these platforms will be increasingly beneficial as young professionals fill jobs and play a more prominent role in their companies.

The decisions that are typical for the b2c market also make sense in the 2b2 market, Tony said, because “ultimately they bring revenue and reduce barriers to making a purchase decision.”

And although b2b clients can use work accounts instead of personal ones, he added “you can offer them a model that will already be familiar to them and encourage them for it.”

4. Get customers to do the work for you

Content creation is hard work. So why not attract customers to this? Especially when it leads to a phenomenal increase in trust and creativity.

Take, for example, HCSS, a developer of IT solutions for builders who were able to achieve a fantastic level of customer involvement in their marketing activities. How did they do it?

Naturally, there are years of work behind this, but the most important moment came when the company was able to involve customers in its process. The company was able to remove all obstacles between its marketing and customers.

It began with attempts to increase the level of customer openness. HCSS customers use software to take advantage of construction tenders.

HCSS marketers have often heard success stories from customers, but it was very difficult to get a description of the cases from them. The HCSS team wanted to keep these stories always at hand, set out in clients' own words, and not in a purely marketing-polished manner.

“Although we are market leaders, we still have many areas in which we can grow,” said Den Brisco, vice president of marketing for HCSS, which already has more than 4,000 customers. "We want to increase brand awareness and expand our customer base."

One of the problems faced by the company is that a typical client doesn’t know much about social services. networks and modern online tools.

Cara MacDonald, a marketing specialist, adds that one of the problems they faced in the past was that the client was ready to easily tell a success story at lunch, but as soon as the official interview began, the client seemed to stone.

After that, the company decided to play on a sense of pride, ambition and clients' inclination for natural competition by running a contest for the most interesting project in a slightly insane spring style.

Entries for this contest went so fast that HCSS first increased the section on the site to 120 cases, and then completely reworked the site around this contest. It turned out that the company's customers began to sell themselves to their potential customers with the help of cases on the HCSS website.

The success of this project brought content marketing to a new level. Thus, they were able to combine sales and marketing and only benefited from this.

Initially, the idea was simple “to go beyond talking only about ourselves, to move away from the tendency to focus only on our company, showing what innovative products we are doing and how we are loved for it. In fact, customers do not care, and when they really want to know about us, they prefer to hear about our company from others, ”said Dan.

And as soon as HCSS learned to make true story characters out of its customers, “it turned our world upside down,” he said. “It took a lot of effort to stop talking about how our customers love our software before we finally broke free. But as soon as we did, we took off. ”

The project, which the team developed, was not only aimed at their clients, but was also motivated by the desire to raise the level of the entire construction industry.



Brisco and his team of 22 specialists created the campaign “I'm Building America” under the title “Pride. Respect. Building". As part of this campaign, the site was finalized, content was developed, awards were held, a training program was created, and significant social services were involved. network.

Funny, he added, but as soon as we stopped focusing on sales, we began to set new records every quarter. The marketing team has doubled, and the focus on the client, as the main character, has left its mark on our corporate culture.

5. Transfer work to colleagues

The financial company United Capital has changed its weekly newsletter, focusing on user reviews of services and included in the reviews the opinion of experts of the company itself, instead of the edited content.

→ Sample Letter

By bringing together company experts from different areas, Christina Martin (Vice-President for Digital Communications, United Capital) with her team was able to form a committee to develop content within the company.

“Companies like ours always have narrow experts on various issues. However, these people do not always like to write, and in general, creating content is not their job, ”she said.
The established committee meets every month, planning topics for the next 2 months.

“We are discussing current marketing campaigns, brainstorming content that will be used in upcoming marketing activities, plan new topics and distribute experts to work with copywriters,” continued Christina.

By placing the original content written by internal experts, instead of the materials diluted by the editors, the marketing team United Capital was able to increase the list of involvement of the mailing list by 145% per year.