3 of the Most Successful B2B Social Media Campaigns

You've heard it time and time again: Every successful business needs a robust and engaging social media presence. And you’re probably already using social media in your marketing — but are you actually using it effectively?

Most of the time, B2C brands get all the attention on social media, but B2B social media use may surprise you. It's easy to fall into the perception that B2B marketing is boring and unfit for social media and, ultimately, many B2B brand gets overlooked (or under looked). But this is wrong!

Social media is an extremely effective tool for B2B marketers because it can help you:

• Increase brand awareness
• Humanize B2B companies
• Establish your company as a thought leader
• Connect with prospects, clients and industry influencers
• Increase lead conversion rate

Don't believe me? Let's take a look at three brands with the most successful social media campaigns for B2B:

1. Drift

Drift, the first conversational marketing provider, has always been incredibly vocal about the care, effort and focus they put into their customers — and they show that care through their engaging use of social media.

Facebook Tagline: “Drift is changing the way businesses buy from businesses.”

Twitter Tagline: “Connect your sales teams with your future customers NOW.”

Campaign Strategy: By using a mix of questions, quotes, images, videos and links, Drift creates posts that are relatable and easy to digest by their audience. They frequently showcase their own customers in their social posts and shares, including this retweet that commends a user for their creative use of the Drift bot:

Additionally, they always take the time to respond to comments, questions and reviews left by their followers.

Why They Work: As Drift puts it, one of the core principles that directs everything they do as a company is to be “customer-driven, not company-driven.” By using their social media to emphasize their care for the customer, respond to reviews, offer advice for troubleshooting and optimizing their product and engage with both customers and prospects, they’ve infused their entire company philosophy into their social engagements.

In other words, Drift’s social strategy works because it’s:

• Engaging
• Human
• Customer-focused
• Brand-consistent

2. WeWork

WeWork is a creative company that provides shared workspaces and business services for entrepreneurs, freelancers, startups, small businesses and large enterprises. As they say on their website, “Community is our catalyst,” so it should come as a shock to nobody that they’ve used their social channels to build an authentic community of like-minded people.

Facebook Tagline: “WeWork is the platform for creators. We provide beautiful workspace, an inspiring community, and business services to thousands of members worldwide.”

LinkedIn Tagline: “Make a life, not just a living. Share your stories using #wework.”

Campaign Strategy: Focusing greatly on insights, tips and case studies, WeWork’s social posts offer 30-second educational videos demonstrating how to maximize your office space, beautiful images of their customers’ workspaces and a mix of non-product-related motivational posts like this one: 

Why They Work: Similar to Drift’s, WeWork’s social presence is less about their pushing their product and more about spreading their mission and helping their customers grow. They encourage their customers and prospects to engage by sharing their stories with the hashtag #wework, creating a thriving community based on shared values. As Michael Fitzsimmons, WeWork’s VP of Creative Strategy, puts it, the content on their social channels “represent[s] real challenges that a lot of businesses deal with on a daily basis."

In other words, WeWork’s social strategy works because it’s:

• Visual
• Educational
• Community-focused
• Brand-consistent

3. IBM

International Business Machines Corporation is a global information technology company that provides hardware, software, cloud-based services and cognitive computing to businesses. IBM has become somewhat notorious for their powerful social presence, and after taking a quick tour of their social media channels, it’s easy to see why.

Facebook Tagline: “Learn more about AI, cloud, data, security and systems and discover what’s possible. https://ibm.com”

Twitter Tagline: “Together with our clients, we're using technologies like AI, cloud, blockchain & IoT to transform business, industries and the world. Let’s put smart to work.”

Campaign Strategy: Using a mix of high-quality photography, videos, employee profiles, trending hashtags and more, IBM showcases their brand values and mission in every aspect of their social media campaigns. They often share interviews with their own employees, adding a human element to their brand, and they build their social community by emphasizing shared values and “togetherness.” Their campaigns are always highly unique, engaging and reflective of their mission, such as the post below:

Why They Work: IBM’s social strategy stands out because it connects each post with their brand values and mission, frequently tailors its content around current events and other trending topics, showcases the people, processes and progress that make up their company and creates a compelling brand identity that encourages users to join their community. As they say on their website, “IBMers believe in progress — that the application of intelligence, reason and science can improve business, society and the human condition,” and everything they post on social reflects this mission.

In other words, IBM’s social strategy works because it’s:

• Timely/relevant
• Eclectic
• Values-based
• Brand-consistent

The Takeaway

Even in the oversaturated social channels, each of these companies have managed to build social presences that truly stand out. All of their social content is relevant to their ideal buyers, consistent with their brand identity, reflective of their people and true to their values.

Images and video, of course, are more important than they’ve ever been, and each brand includes a healthy dose of these elements in their social campaigns as well. Lastly, by taking the time to engage with their followers and act more like a human than a business, they’ve been able to connect with their followers on a one-to-one level.

Keep in mind, it's not about B2B or B2C, but rather H2H, human-to-human, marketing. At the end of the day, whether your products or services are used by individuals or businesses, you're still selling to people — and including that human element in your social campaigns is what really makes an impact.

Boost The Value Of Your Content With These 7 Promotional Strategies

Content marketing is a key component of the inbound methodology — but if the content you’re creating is never consumed, shared or downloaded by your audience, then it won’t make any significant impact on your marketing goals.

“There are three main phases of marketing that should always be occurring,” says Guido Bartolacci, New Breed’s Head of Demand Generation Marketing. Those three phases are:

• Planning: During this stage, you develop your strategy, including the amount and types of content you need to create.
• Production: During this stage, you actually create that content, which could include writing, filming, designing and more.
• Promotion: During this stage, you push your content out to different channels to get as many eyes on it as possible.

In this blog post, we’ll focus on the promotion stage of content marketing. We’re going to use blog content as an example for the many ways you can promote that content, but these strategies can be adapted for premium content offers, videos, guides and more.

7 Promotional Strategies to Amplify Your Content

1. Search Engine Optimization for Organic Growth

When you publish a new blog post, the first step to putting it in front of your audience is making sure it’s SEO-optimized. When Google crawls and indexes your page, it’s more likely to be found through organic searches.

However, getting your site indexed can take anywhere from four days to four weeks, and its performance could dip over time if you’re not consistently optimizing it for its relevance, timeliness and keywords. That means SEO strategy is a type of passive promotion, so you shouldn’t rely on it as your sole promotional technique.

“[Getting indexed by Google] is just going to happen and will likely grow over time,” says Guido. “But you need to work on promoting your content outside of that as well.”

If you manage and publish your content on HubSpot, for example, then it automatically gets added to your site map and indexed by Google, so there’s no additional work you need to do outside of simply clicking “publish.”

2. Email Blasts to Engaged Subscribers

According to this study by Campaign Monitor, you’re six times more likely to get click-throughs from an email than you are from a social channel like Twitter.

Why? Because email subscribers are already engaged with your brand.

“Ideally, these people have subscribed to your blog to learn more about who you are and to be educated by the content you’re creating,” explains Guido. “So you need to get your content in front of them first.”

Again, marketing automation tools like HubSpot can help you automate this process, and built-in personalization tools can help you retain that human touch.

3. Social Posts to Meet Prospects Where They Are

From LinkedIn to Instagram, social media sites offer a powerful channel for engaging with prospects, humanizing your brand and promoting your content.

Share your content on every social channel relevant to your personas. Almost always, those channels will include Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin, but it ultimately depends on the unique online behaviors of your ideal buyers.

Social posting can also be automated using tools like HubSpot. “But if you start connecting your marketing automation platform to multiple social accounts, then you’ll start to see the same post go out from multiple team members,” says Guido, “which can look a little funny. So if you’re looking to get a bit more engagement and personalize your brand, then manually writing and posting on social has its benefits as well.”

Additionally, social groups exist for almost every area of business, and promoting your content within these groups can be valuable because they make up a more targeted, contextualized audience.

“The last thing with social that can be super beneficial is tagging influencers,” says Guido. Tagging influencers and encouraging them to share your content can be made more feasible by creating content like:

• Round-up posts
• Influencer profiles or interviews
• Product reviews

4. Content Syndication to Reach New Audiences

Asking other leaders in your space to republish your blog content on their website is a great way to expose your content to new and interested audiences.

“New Breed gets our blog content syndicated on OpenView, which is super helpful for us,” says Guido. “We use a canonical tag which tells Google that our post should rank — so we don’t experience any issues with duplicate content.”

This strategy has mutual benefits for each company because they get to post a fresh piece of content on their website without much effort on their part, and we get to promote our subject matter expertise to a new audience.

However, without the ability to use a canonical tag, you could run into issues with duplicate content and have your republished piece outranking the original blog page. This problem tends to arise when you’re posting on websites that allow user-generated content like Quora or Medium.

Avoid this by altering your post slightly when you post to websites like these. Instead of republishing the full post, change the title slightly, condense the content and end with a teaser link to view the full post on your website.

5. Guest Posting for Mutual Promotional Benefit

“Guest posting in itself is a great way to amplify your brand,” says Guido, “and one of the things you can do is write a guest post in a way that promotes another piece of content you have to drive readers to your website.”

For example, New Breed could publish a post about SaaS marketing on an industry-related website, and then link to our guide, “The Definitive Guide to SaaS Marketing.”

Remember, though, guest posting should offer mutual benefit for both parties, so you can also solicit guest contributions from other professionals in your industry. When they post an original piece of content on your website, they’re likely to share and promote it to their own audience, so you’re still driving new visitors to your website.

6. Paid Ads and Remarketing to Bring Readers Back

“Paid ads and remarketing are typically going to be used to promote a gated content offer,” says Guido. “The reason for that is because you’re paying for that traffic, so you want to get as much value out of it as possible — and one of the best ways to do that is by collecting their information through a form.”

At New Breed, for example, we exclusively promote content offers via paid, not any of our bottom-of-the-funnel offers like free assessments. Of course, that’s not going to be the same for every company.

Companies with frictionless funnel — for example, those with a product-led growth strategy — might be able to promote free trials and demos through paid ads and remarketing.

But if your sales process is a bit more complex, it may be worth pulling people into your funnel at the awareness stage and then nurturing them through.

7. Contests for Added Hype and Engagement

Contests might not be the obvious choice for content promotion, but they can be a powerful tool for creating and soliciting content that almost promotes itself.

For example, OpenView recently did a March Madness-esque contest about product-led growth. They solicited submissions from different companies about their product-led growth strategies, and the top-performing posts were compiled into an e-book at the end.

Companies that entered the contest were more likely to promote their submissions and, in turn, drive their audience to OpenView’s website.

Bonus Tip for Content Promotion: How do you choose which pieces of content to promote?

“If it’s a net-new piece of content, promote the hell out of it,” says Guido. “You’ve just spent all this time and energy on creating it, and you can’t just let that go to waste.”

That will also give you a sense of whether or not your new content actually resonates with your audience. If it does, you might want to consider creating more content on that topic.

For older content, you should lump pieces into three categories:

• High-performers
• Medium-performers
• Low-performers

You should be constantly working your high-performing content into your regular promotional process. Your high-performers won’t always be your latest, freshest content, so be sure to loop them into your email newsletters, social shares and other promotional strategies from time to time.

For example, New Breed’s top-performing post was originally published in 2016, but it continues to drive new traffic to our website.

Medium performers should be revisited and re-optimized periodically to try to push them into the high-performing category and get more value out of them. Every time you re-optimize a piece of content, loop it back into your overall promotional strategy.

Lastly, low performers should be taken out of circulation over time.

“At New Breed, we noticed that we had two premium content offers that were consistently converting leads, so they appeared to be high-performers,” says Guido. “But literally nobody who converted on those offers ever became customers, so in reality, it was a low performer for us. We decided to un-gate it and convert it into a blog post so it would continue to drive traffic to our website.”

That’s not always how you’ll want to deal with low-performing content, however. In some cases, you have to face the fact that a specific piece of content simply isn’t driving value for your company and be willing to take it off of your website.

When it comes to blog posts, for example, Google’s ranking algorithm considers your domain in its entirety. If there are a high number of posts that nobody engages with, that can hurt your domain authority overall.

What is Contextual Marketing 🙇🏼‍♀️

Without a full understanding of your prospects' situations, you won't be able to position your marketing content effectively.

For example, if a prospect is reading SEO-related content on your website, a call-to-action to download an email marketing e-book isn’t likely to convert them. You want to make sure you have a full understanding of your prospects’ situations when you’re creating any marketing content. The more you know about them, the better you can understand what they need and how to position it for them.

That's why contextualizing your marketing strategy is so important: it helps prospects easily understand, relate to and find value in all the content they receive.

What is Contextual Marketing?

Contextual marketing is a strategy that’s guided by the behaviors and conditions surrounding your marketing efforts so all content is relevant to the person receiving it.

Contextual marketing is a pillar of inbound marketing but is applicable universally. To be effective, marketing content must be pertinent to the people it’s reaching.

And contextual relevance isn’t just defined by content. The timeliness matters as well, so the information stays relevant.

For example, say someone requests an email marketing e-book and you don’t send it until two months later. Even though the content is what they asked for, the timing made it irrelevant.

How Do You Deliver Contextually Relevant Content?

To deliver contextually relevant information, you need to understand the psychographics of your buyer personas to know how to speak to them in terms of voice and tone and what content will resonate with them.

For example, marketing director might be more concerned with demonstrating ROI as opposed to an entry-level marketing member who’s just interested in how to execute tactics.

The communication channels that are most effective may also differ persona to persona, so in addition to understanding what content works best and how it should be positioned, knowing where to deliver it is also important to contextual marketing.

If a persona isn’t on social media, then Twitter shouldn’t be your sole means of communicating with them.

In some cases, you might not know the next step that perfectly aligns with the behavior of a prospect. In that case, you need to frame the content to match the context. If you’re sending a prospect content that might not be their first choice, but you position it well, they might still download it if you tailor your message specifically to them.

For example, if someone has read everything you have to offer on SEO, you might follow up with content about conversion optimization and frame it with a message along the lines of:

“You’ve been working hard to attract website visitors, but what are they doing once they arrive on your website? Based on your interest in SEO, we thought you might be interested in our conversion optimization guide…”

The worst thing you can do is wrongfully insert context. If someone is from a B2C company, sending them marketing content referring to them as B2B will be detrimental to their impression of you.

The Importance of Buyer Persona Segmentation

Creating content around specific buyer personas and behaviors won’t work if you don’t have a way to deliver it to just those people. That’s where segmentation comes into play.

Every Customer Relationship Management platform (CRM) should have the ability to segment your contacts. CRM systems store different data points about each contact that you can use to organize people based on the criteria you have data for.

For example, you can use your CRM to create a list of contacts who work in the manufacturing industry at companies that have 100–200 employees.

There’s no “right” way to segment. Instead, it’s all based on the marketing activity you’re trying to do. If your goal is to generate awareness, you’re going to be targeting a much larger audience then if you’re promoting a product that only works for a portion of your target market.

How Do You Tailor Content to General Audiences?

If you have multiple buyer personas, it can be difficult to tailor your message on channels that could reach anybody, like on social media. So, when developing your strategy for Facebook or LinkedIn, you want to create content that is all-encompassing and can be applicable to all your personas.

If you sell your product or service to companies in three different industries, you want to highlight all three through your content. Or, if you’re hosting a webinar that’s only relevant to one of those industries then that needs to be clearly communicated in your promotion.

However, when possible, refine your audience.

Varying your content formats can also strengthen your contextual marketing strategy. If someone only consumes video content, chances are they won’t be interested in reading a 50-page guide.

To adapt to a variety of learning styles, make your content available in different formats.

While it might not be possible for you to have a visual and written version of every piece of content, there’s a wide variety of ways you can make your content more accessible.

A webinar can become a blog post or infographic. A blog can become a podcast topic.

Start by just getting the content out there, and then add different variations that can better appeal to different audience members.

Adding a Personal Touch to Your Content

Most marketing automation platforms that can integrate with CRM systems offer personalization, which can help add context to content that reaches general audiences, such as your website.

A name is a pretty universal piece of information you can leverage to create a more personalized experience for your prospects. While you wouldn’t want to use someone’s name in a blog post — content created and presented to general audiences is not the right context for personalization like that — you could have your chatbot greet them by name.

The same goes for company names. Targeting content around a company’s name and industry works well in email subject lines or chatbots.

You can also use variable content for CTAs and landing pages so you don’t show someone a CTA for a piece of content they already downloaded or include a form question they’ve already answered.

You can also personalize based on custom properties specific to what you look for in a customer base. For example, a finance software might need to know what currency a company uses.

You can also set properties based on events or engagements. So automation can be triggered by visiting a specific website page or registering for a webinar.

The Takeaway

Use all these strategies in moderation. Don’t make it obvious you’re automating contextualization or personalization by sending an email with 12 personalized properties in the first paragraph. You want prospects to feel like you’re catering to them, not like you’re stalking them.

Additionally, if you don’t have the capabilities to be super-granular, being broad and inclusive is better than being exclusive and incorrect.

When gathering information about prospects, don’t overlook the value of talking to them. Don’t rely solely on data enrichment tools to gather information. Once you’re talking to someone in person, make sure to verify the information you have is correct.

At the end of the day, every marketing strategy should be contextual because that’s how you’re going to deliver the most value to your prospects and customers.

10 Selling Techniques to Help You Become a Better Salesperson

We believe that every good salesperson (or any person at all) always has room to grow in their role and improve their skills.

That’s why we invest so much in the continued education of our team, encourage them to take time out of their days to read industry publications and let them test their ideas — all in confidence that they’ll use this information to get better at what they do.

Our salespeople have learned a lot along the way, so we decided to share some of our tips with you. Here are our top 10 techniques to help you become a better salesperson.

1. Understand Your Market

Above all else, you can't be an effective salesperson if you don't understand who you're selling to and what the market landscape looks like. We're not talking about just knowing their name, title, company name, website URL and email. We're talking about really understanding what makes them tick.

What does a day in the life of your prospect look like? What challenges are they facing? What could make their life easier?

Gaining this knowledge about your prospect will help improve your understanding of how they can benefit from your solution and enable you to position your product or service in a way that will resonate with them.

In addition to understanding your prospects’ pain points, you also need to know who else is trying to solve for them outside of your company. What does the competitive landscape look like? How does your solution stack up? Examine how the competition is selling and pitching, and then do something different.

You want to stand out and be unique, while still speaking to what your prospects need (and want).

2. Focus on the Right Leads

According to Ken Krogue, Founder & Board Member of InsideSales.com, "it's really about the leads." From our standpoint, this means understanding what makes a lead a good fit for your company so you don’t waste your time on people who will never become customers.

It starts with knowing who you're targeting (i.e. identifying your buyer personas and ideal customer profile). From there, you should be able to determine what they're struggling with, what their challenges are and how you can align your messaging and offers to their pain points.

When you focus on the right leads, you tend to see better win rates, larger average deal sizes and higher customer lifetime value. If you’re focusing on the people who are best served by your solution, it’s easier to close them as customers.

This way, you’re not spending as much time selling to them and you’re going to have a higher probability of closing them. You just have to ensure your timing is right and that they’re ready for what you’re offering.

3. Prioritize Your Company Above Yourself

At New Breed, we like to say that selling is a team sport. The marketing team helps the sales team. Sales team members help each other out. All the work each individual and each team does has the same end goal: Helping the business grow.

Keep that same ideology in mind anytime you make a decision. Prioritize your customers first, then your company second, your team third and yourself last.

4. Leverage Your CRM

At New Breed, we're big fans of Salesforce. Our sales team uses it as their CRM platform, but we've also integrated it with HubSpot, our marketing automation software, so there's full transparency between marketing and sales. Our sales team is able to see a prospect’s digital body language, or how they’ve interacted with our content.

Knowing what blog posts they've read, what pages they've visited and what emails they've opened can give us a better sense of what they’re interested in, what their pain points are and how they came to know about us in the first place can better inform our outreach.

If we see someone is reading content about conversion strategies, then we can then look at how they are converting people on their website and provide personalized input through our initial outreach that demonstrates our understanding of their pain points and illustrates how we can address those challenges.

5. Be Data Informed

When you're a small company like us (actually — this rings true even if you're a large company), efficiencies can help tremendously. Pay close attention to your metrics and marketing funnel to find out what's working and what isn't. What's helping your sales team close more deals? What seems to be something they're stumbling over?

Data doesn't lie, so listening to the numbers is a critical component to your sales success.

We know that data analysis can take a lot of time, so if you're not accustomed to measuring your sales efforts, start with biannual reports and make them as in-depth and detailed as possible. Once you've gotten to that point, start doing quarterly reports. These can be a little lighter than the biannual ones, but should still contain detailed metrics. Then go as granular as monthly. This can be the lightest of the three versions and just looks at your sales on a higher level.

The goal for each of the reports should be to show you something from a different perspective. By looking at different trends you can make smarter decisions that will improve your results in the long run.

6. Really Listen to Your Prospects

According to Mark Roberge, the former CRO of HubSpot’s Sales Division, "You know you are running a modern sales team when selling feels more like the relationship between a doctor and a patient and less like a relationship between a salesperson and a prospect."

So, what does he mean by that?

In order to be effective salespeople, we need to be able to listen to our prospects. We tend to be a self-centered culture, in part thanks to social media, so it's important that as a salesperson, you care about your prospects — and not just on the surface. That will shine through in your conversations, help build trust and help close deals.

7. Build Trust Through Education

Building trust can be difficult when you're trying to sell someone a product or service. We've been conditioned to have a bad reaction to a "salesperson," as they've been made out to be slimy and untrustworthy.

So today, it's important that you foster that relationship and build trust with your prospect. A great way to do that is through education.

When we say education, we're really talking about your content. Use your blog, your premium content offers, your webinars and other content to help educate your prospect on what your organization offers.

Don't just go in for the hard pitch right away. If you help to educate them, enabling them to make their own decisions (which you've helped guide toward your solution), they will begin to trust you. And once you have trust, you're much more likely to win the relationship.

To benefit the most from your educational outreach, personalize your efforts. Sending the same blog post to 20 people is just marketing. Sales is a one-on-one conversation.

Instead of sending along a blog post or webinar by itself, take a quote from a relevant content offering and apply it to your prospect specifically to provide education, leverage the content you have and still be human.

8. Focus on Helping

How often do you get a call from a salesperson and all they talk about is the brand new features of the product they're offering? You listen politely, but think to yourself, "Yeah, but how does this help me?"

The truth is: features don't help you. At least in the way they're usually positioned by sales. What you really want to know is, "How is what you're selling going to solve X for me?" Essentially, you want to know how the offer will address your challenges.

As a salesperson, this differentiation is key. Rather than focusing on the features of your solution, think about how those features can help your prospect. How are you solving one of their challenges or pain points?

If you understand who your buyer personas are, then you know what their challenges and pain points are and how your solution aligns with that. This is the opportunity to focus on the benefits of your product or service — i.e., how you can make that person’s day a little easier.

When you can talk up the benefits, you'll have a much easier time convincing prospects that your organization can most effectively solve their needs.

9. End Each Meeting with an Action

When you leave your next meeting, rather than saying something like, "I'll follow up with you on our next steps," create your next steps right then and there.

We tested this methodology on our own sales team and saw huge results. We used to end our meetings with a prospect by indicating they could expect to hear from us in a few hours with a few times that worked for our next meeting. We kept finding it was increasingly harder to book that next meeting.

So we decided to switch our strategy. Now, when we're ending a sales call, we finish on a concrete action. We all pull up our calendars and book our next meeting on the spot. And guess what? We've seen our conversion rates increase as a result of it.

So next time you're in a sales meeting, don't leave empty handed. Set up your next meeting while you're there with the prospect, or at the very least, have a concrete action plan that both sides have agreed upon.

10. Use Your Marketing Team

Your marketing and sales teams need to be aligned. There's so much these two departments can learn from each other to help the organization reach its main goal of generating more revenue.

On the sales side, use your marketing team to your advantage. Talk to them about what your prospects are saying — are they responding well to a piece of content? Did they not enjoy the webinar they attended? Share these insights with your marketing team so they can continue to feed you higher and higher quality leads. You should also share your reports with the marketing team. Full transparency will help you both be more effective.

Marketing should be enabling your sales team to be more successful. Part of that is delivering leads, part of that is enabling sales with good content and part of that is ensuring a smooth handoff. But marketing needs to work with sales to do all those things.

At New Breed, we have a revenue team instead of separate marketing and sales teams, so marketing and sales are aligned behind the same goal: generating revenue. Because marketing is measured on their contribution to revenue instead of the number of leads they generate, they’re more incentivized to bring in high-quality leads that have a high likelihood to become clients.

But if there isn’t transparency between the two teams, marketing won’t have the information they need to ensure they’re providing sales with qualified leads.

If these tips weren't enough and you want to dig even deeper into the world of inbound sales, download our Complete Guide to Inbound Sales for even more information and best practices:

This post was originally published January 8, 2014.

What is Product Marketing?

Content marketing involves boosting brand awareness and nurture prospects into customers through content like blogs, eBooks or webinars. Conversational marketing does the same thing through one-to-one conversations with your prospects. Lifecycle marketing involves tailoring your content marketing efforts to the different lifecycle stages.

Although “product marketing” follows the same naming convention, it doesn’t actually refer to marketing through your product or with your product as a channel.

What Is Product Marketing?

Product marketing is the process of bringing a specific product to market. The end goal for product marketers is ensuring the product is successful.

Product marketing starts with the go-to-market strategy. The marketer understands the need that exists within the market, has a product that satisfies that need and is now developing the positioning and value proposition that will resonate within the target market.

A product marketer might not necessarily be performing outward-facing marketing — they might not be creating promotional content or even speaking to consumers. Instead, their efforts are focused on guiding the strategy internally.

They’re responsible for developing the messaging for the product and passing it along to everyone else within the company. Similar to the way marketing enables sales, product marketing enables all the other marketing activities.

How Does Product Marketing Help You Improve the Product Over Time?

Product marketing doesn’t stop with the sale of the product. In addition to helping deliver the product to users initially, product marketing also helps create a feedback loop to help improve the product over time.

Overall, marketing won’t necessarily be concerned with the onboarding process, but the experience established during the first 30 days of use is a critical component of a product’s success.

When a consumer buys your product, they understand the problem they have and why your product can help, but they might not know how to actually use your product to solve that problem.

Therefore, product marketers want to ensure a smooth transition from sales to service. They help develop and execute an onboarding process that provides value to the user and enables adoption of the product.

With complex SaaS products like HubSpot, managed services channel partners like New Breed can do majority of the product marketing. We help users gain value from HubSpot and ensure their product actually helps users grow their business.

Collecting Feedback

Understanding the way that users actually engage with your product is a key component of improving it. Align your marketing messaging with the actual user experience to ensure consistency throughout the buyer's lifecycle.

There are a number of ways you can collect feedback about your product, including:

• Analyzing usage: You can observe product usage by measuring the frequency of logins and which features are being utilized. Tracking and understanding those patterns will provide insight into user behaviors and help product marketers and product developers decide where to focus their efforts.

• NPS and customer satisfaction surveys: Soliciting feedback through net promoter score (NPS) surveys and customer feedback surveys can provide insight into how customers feel about your product. The results of these surveys can reveal strengths and weaknesses in your positioning, onboarding and product.

During the initial product development and launch, the product marketing and product development teams should work closely together to ensure that the product has everything it needs to satisfy the target market. They also need to be on the same page about what is and isn’t included, as well as the plan for future development.

When you’re first developing a product, you’re going to come up with your MVP, the minimum viable product, that will satisfy the market. In addition to that, you’ll probably have a list of features to consider adding over time.

Once the product is launched, the teams should work together to choose which additions and improvements to focus on based on the feedback coming in.

The Takeaways

Marketing focuses on your business as a whole, while product marketing focuses on a specific product — but there is some overlap between the responsibilities of product marketing and general marketing functions.

Marketing is responsible for creating general sales enablement materials, and product marketing is responsible for developing sales enablement materials for specific products.

Both teams work with a company’s buyer personas and need to understand the challenges they have. But creating those personas is the responsibility of general marketing teams, whereas product marketers focus more on understanding which persona pain points their product addresses and how to create a message that speaks to those.

However, if a product is created to expand your company’s reach into a new market, then product marketers may be involved in developing that new persona.

On top of the shared general marketing tasks, product marketers have specific responsibilities related to the individual product. The go-to-market strategy (GTM) entirely falls within the product marketers purview. When developing and enacting the GTM, product marketers need to:

• Define the target market
• Identify which buyer persona pain points the product addresses
• Develop the product’s value proposition
• Conduct competitor analysis
• Pick a pricing strategy
• Determine purchasing methods
• Ensure internal alignment around the product’s purpose, functionality and messaging
• Provide useful onboarding resources that enable successful product adoption

Assuming that all the steps of product marketing have gone well, then your product might be well-positioned for product-led growth, where your product will sell itself through the value it provides.

What is Omnichannel Personalization?

You’ve probably heard the term “omnichannel” to describe any business practice that extends across channels, both digital and in-person. When it comes to the omnichannel customer experience, the idea is simple: you’re appealing to one human, so you need to deliver one cohesive experience, because people don’t think about their interactions with your company in [...]

What is Omnichannel Personalization?

You’ve probably heard the term “omnichannel” to describe any business practice that extends across channels, both digital and in-person. When it comes to the omnichannel customer experience, the idea is simple: you’re appealing to one human, so you need to deliver one cohesive experience, because people don’t think about their interactions with your company in [...]