For B2B organizations, standing out takes creativity, dedication, and reliable online marketing resources. The sea of content available is making it more challenging than ever to find simple tools that help in a significant way, while also offering tips with true muscle behind them.
Well, here’s the good news. If you’re looking for insights and strategies on how to build a solid integrated marketing strategy based on common sense and simple actions that keep content chaos in check, you’ve just hit the jackpot.
And here’s why.
These reference materials will help your B2B organization take the driver’s seat when it comes to planning, organization, and crushing digital marketing in 2016. No guru, no puppet master. Simple tools at your fingertips to help shape your marketing efforts and make your customer experience more efficient than ever before.
Are you game? Then let’s rock this!
B2B Marketing Strategy Workbook
What it is: The B2B Marketing Strategy Workbook is an online marketing resource focused on how to build simple content strategies with big impact. As a hands-on tool, the workbook walks you through the planning, creation, distribution and optimization stages of content in depth, making it easy to understand and implement as a team or organization.
Why you need it: “Goals” and “objectives” are buzzwords that can drive team members to tune out. This workbook provides a simple, streamlined way for you to think about, clarify, and commit to a targeted strategy through content. It also offers clear, specific templates that illustrate everything you need to develop a clear, robust, customer-focused strategy that delivers.
How it will help: To create a truly integrated and effective buyer’s journey, all marketing content needs to have a place and purpose. This workbook can help organizations look at the big picture, as well as key areas of growth or needed improvement. Most importantly, it’s a powerful tool for reducing and eliminating content chaos, while also bringing your content to a whole new level of awesomeness and clarity.
Salesforce
What it is: A customer relationship management (CRM) platform and tool that’s cloud-based, making it easy to use and integrate worldwide without the need to develop complicated infrastructures.
Why you need it: Customer relationships are the key to the marketing cycle. Beyond generating revenue, customer feedback offers priceless marketing insights, and the word-of-mouth marketing it provides is also essential for reaching new potential clients. As a dynamic, feature-rich online marketing resource, Salesforce enables you to manage the most precious aspect of your business: your customers.
How it will help: With one platform, you can centralize customer data, track leads, organize social media channels, evaluate trends in customer behavior, and create more accurate buyer personas. These features alone make customer management easier, while also saving time and reducing content chaos. B2B organizations can also build apps related to specific business needs and access the community section to pose questions and get tips.
Marketo
What it is: A marketing automation solution for B2B organizations big and small. It maximizes marketing efforts and drives conversions.
Why you need it: This online marketing resource gives you a simple way to streamline, integrate, and track all your marketing efforts on one platform, with shared accessibility for all. B2B organizations have to manage so many levels of marketing—email, inbound, events, upsell and cross sell, ads etc.—that there’s simply no way to do it all without a little automation assistance.
How it will help: Marketing automation is a fairly new practice. Marketo helps organizations leverage the capabilities and benefits of marketing automation and fills the “education gap” with plenty of online tutorials and tools. In fact, Marketo has fantastic topic-based “cheat sheets” tailored for the B2B marketing space that provide key tips and techniques and are consistently updated. This cheat sheet feature alone is worth it for the online education available at your fingertips.
Radian6
What it is: An online social media tracking tool that enables you to quickly and efficiently monitor all your social media channels, react to comments and complaints in real time, and route key information to the right person. It works as a standalone tool or it can integrate with Salesforce as part of its marketing cloud.
Why you need it: If you want to monitor your brand at every level, you need to know what people are saying about you online in a broader way. This tool makes it easy to streamline all that information so you can take clear, educated action, understand what’s working (or not), and react to any negative brand influence taking place in blogs, forums, or social media.
How it will help: Radian6 makes it much easier to scale your brand monitoring and request follow-up by the appropriate team member and department, all from within the platform. It also makes it easier to leverage real-time interactions as they happen in order to improve customer service.
Reverse Engineer Your Funnel: The Starter Guide
What it is: A step-by-step guide to help build a framework that calculates sales pipeline goals within a sales cycle.
Why you need it: This online marketing resource helps B2B organizations get to the heart of how to create more accurate sales goals based on the big picture: by working backward. It’s perfect for marketers new to demand generation marketing, organizations that want to learn how to manage their buyer’s journey more effectively, or marketers who want to use data-driven strategies to create accurate sales goals along the sales pipeline.
How it will help: By using a specific guide to reverse-engineer your sales funnel, you can see what’s working in terms of total revenue, deal size, conversions, etc. and create sales goals that make sense. This online marketing resource also offers specific, proven calculations used by other big B2B organizations that enable you to analyze things at a very meta level. The best part is its reusability: you can leverage it to analyze the sales cycle for every product and service in the organization, as often as you want.
These online marketing resources will help you kick off your 2016 marketing in true rock star style.
Use any of these tools? Which ones are the most helpful?