Welcome to this edition of B2B Marketing at its Core, an industry newsletter with news, nuggets, and information on best practices in business-to-business technology marketing and public relations. With it, we hope to share information vital to any organization looking to generate revenue and accelerate growth through intelligent strategy, messaging, branding, public relations and demand generation.


Business-to-business technology companies often face two combined hurdles: how to generate content for marketing and sales and how to increase leads for the sales team.

In order to keep prospective customers energized and interested in your products or services, marketing teams must have relevant and compelling content to deliver as part of their marketing strategy. Often companies struggle in developing original content because, simply put, they are focused on delivering their core business. This puts B2B marketers in a bind.

Creating killer content
One way to break out of this uncomfortable situation is to commit to a thought leadership strategy grounded in unique industry research. Architecting and executing focused survey campaigns is one of the strongest ways to deliver a unique form of thought leadership that generates persuasive content, and that can be leveraged across multiple marketing avenues.

Now that you have content, what’s next?
Now that the marketing team has content, how can they harness it?

From a PR perspective, news releases, bylined articles or interviews with subject matter experts rank high on the list for using your content. A series of presentations and panel events at trade shows are easy extensions and can be coupled with distributing the survey findings at the event.

Build it and leads will come
Every industry has a unique sales cycle, but the common thread for most B2B companies is that the sales force always wants more leads. Today more and more marketers are using thought leadership-based content to generate leads.

Turn your new thought leadership program into leads by merchandising it online. Create a sales sheet highlighting new industry insights and “fast facts” with professionally designed graphics and charts. This becomes a unique collateral piece for the sales team, as well as a very effective website download offer that can attract site visitors, increase traffic and grow your leads database.

Survey findings can also be leveraged in customer and prospect e-marketing efforts. For example, pay-per-click campaigns can be constructed to help disseminate the information and also attract prospects to your website.

Thought leadership-based surveys support and complement other marketing tools such as whitepapers, presentations and media coverage. When using these calls-to-action on your website, don’t forget to employ the “give-to-get” model by adding a registration page for key offers to capture the lead, before users can download the item.

With a smart thought leadership program, B2B companies of all sizes can create compelling and insightful content, repurpose it for multiple marketing efforts, and in the end, use it to support the sales team’s lead generation efforts.

We created B2B Marketing at its Core with the goal of enhancing your marketing and PR practices. We hope you enjoyed this edition. If you have any questions, ask Arketi – we’re always glad to help.

Sincerely,

Arketi Group
core@arketi.com