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Tag: B2B Marketing

The Weekend Wind-Down #3 – March 10, 2024

Wrapping up a bit of a tough week, came down with some kind of bug, but got through it and had a great executive roundtable event on Thursday. Took this weekend to relax and recharge and finally get back in the gym, so I had a great end to the week!

Quote I’m thinking about this weekend
OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman said, “95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly and at almost no cost be handled by the AI”. He predicts this will happen with the advent of Artificial General Intelligence, which will happen in around 5 years. Whether or not he is right about the timeframe and usefulness of AGI, I think this reinforces the idea that marketers and other knowledge workers need to be evolving to work together with AI to be more effective and efficient. AI may replace some jobs, and a portion of people from other jobs, just like previous technological advances have. But I believe that AI will be a powerful tool for those who embrace it, not a competitor.

What I watched this week
I meant to watch Slumdog Millionaire before my India trip, but I ran out of time, and in the end, I’m super glad I waited until I’d already been there. I think if I had watched it earlier, my view of Mumbai may have been skewed by the extreme nature of how the movie portrays it, which was clearly for storytelling purposes. In the end, I loved the movie and the city. There is certainly far more to Mumbai than the slums and gangsters the movie showed, but honestly, the movie could have been set in many countries around the world. So I don’t think it was meant to show India in a bad light but rather, it served as a vibrant backdrop to a classic story of hardship, love, and redemption.

Most interesting study I saw this weekend
This study by Ispos asked participants how confident they feel the global economy will be in 2024 versus 2023. The striking thing to me, was that the top six countries with the highest confidence were all in Asia. India, Indonesia, and China led the way, each with over 80% percent confidence. Singapore came in at 59%, while the US, UK, and Germany all were below 50%. How much this variance is due to the economic realities in each country, will have to be seen, but it does point to Asia (or at least Asian confidence) being on the rise.

Ipsos Global Advisor – 2024 Predictions

What I’m pondering this weekend
I was incredibly inspired by International Women’s Day on Friday and the multitude of activities and posts I saw celebrating women and driving conversations around equality and empowerment. I’ve always been supportive of DEI initiatives and had many incredible women bosses, leaders, and colleagues throughout my career, but with a young daughter, I’m paying more attention than ever. And it got me thinking, what can men like myself who aren’t hiring for leadership positions (Forbes found that women still only make up 32.2% of senior leadership roles), do to be an ally? Is just treating women as the equals they are, standing up in the face of microaggressions, and calling out misogyny when we see it enough? Or is there more we can do?

What I listened to this weekend
Speaking of diversity, The New York Times podcast The Daily had an episode on Google’s Gemini AI chatbot, which made headlines in February when users found out that it would create inaccurate images by injecting diversity into prompts such as those for “a US senator from the 1800s”, “a 1943 German soldier”, and more. This seems to be because Google had included some additional prompting baked in, which was meant to counteract the problem of underrepresentation. But instead, resulted in inaccurate images being generated. Google had to put guardrails in place which stopped Gemini from generating images for certain types of prompts at all. The two main factors leading to this result were Google’s rush to catch up to OpenAI and Microsoft, and measures to “force” diversity into the results. Seems like a pretty clear microcosm of the question of how much affirmative action is the right amount.

Biggest marketing learning reinforcement of the week
I’ve always preached delivering value over sales pitches at conferences, webinars, and roundtables – and sometimes have had to deal with pushback from some people who want to pitch in front of every audience. There’s a time and a place for that, and it isn’t at top of the funnel events. With many solutions I’ve worked on having sales cycles from 6-12 months, there’s no rush to try to sell, it is far better to deliver valuable content and build up thought leadership and relationships first. This was reinforced when talking to my roundtable provider this week when he shared with me that many of his clients end up presenting a long slide deck or demo, only to be unable to run similar events in the future because people don’t want to sit there and listen to boring sales pitches.

That’s it for this week, I hope you had a great weekend and are looking forward to next week!

Note: My goal is to eventually move this newsletter to email format which will land in your inbox every Sunday evening (Singapore time). Subscribe here if you want to receive this by email after I make the change.

March 10, 2024
The Weekend Wind-Down #2 – March 3, 2024

What a week! I’m writing this from Mumbai, having spent the last 4 days here for a work conference and some exploring. I’ve loved it here, the food is amazing, the city bustling, and the conference attendees energetic and ready to learn and grow. I hope to be back soon, but now on to the list!

What I listened to this weekend
I’ve been a big fan of Korean-American chef and entrepreneur, David Chang since I first saw him on Mind of a Chef. I’ve been a loyal listener of his podcasts and even went to Momofuku Ko in NYC before it closed. Often his podcasts are filled with hilarious and informative tirades on food, restaurants, parenthood, or culture and society. This week’s episode contained a hilarious ten-minute exploration of “the platonic ideal of a breakfast burrito” (starts at about 33 minutes in). Well with a listen if you are as passionate about breakfast as I am.

Best viral post I saw this weekend
I first saw this clip on Instagram, but it is being shared all over LinkedIn as well. People all over the world are impressed with a discussion in the Singapore parliament on AI and upskilling workers to remain competitive. The difference is striking when compared to the questioning of TikTok CEO, Shou Chew last month in front of the US Senate, when the US Senator appeared not to understand Singapore isn’t part of China.

What I learned at my first conference in India
Having spent the past 8+ years focused on Southeast Asia with only some time spent on the China and Australia markets, I was excited to hold my first work event in India. I wasn’t disappointed. In some ways, the energy of the delegates reminded me of Indonesia, with everyone being very curious to learn and eager to implement solutions to help them grow. Other than the interest in talking to us and seeing our solution, the other thing that stuck out was the style of sessions at the conference. I always feel that sessions like fireside chats or panels are more engaging than solo presentations, but I would say most times I only see 20-30% of the sessions being something without slides. Here it was completely the opposite, not only were there 4 panel sessions (plus my company’s fireside chat), all of the panels were huge, with 5-to 10 people on stage sharing their expertise. This makes things way more engaging for the audience and it was great to hear from so many CFOs and Heads of Treasury from both India-born companies and MNCs.

Best LinkedIn hack I worked on this weekend
LinkedIn launched the Community Top Voice badge last year, rolling it out to selective users who are able to contribute to Community Articles and earn a badge in various topics. After seeing these contributions start to pop up in my feed, I took the plunge and started contributing as well. After less than a week of contributing to 2-3 articles a day, the “Top Lead Generation Voice” badge appeared on my profile yesterday. I think this is a good way to engage on LinkedIn, because most people don’t ask questions in their own posts, so you can really share your expertise and read what others have to say.

Blog post I’m excited to share
Using ChatGPT can still be a bit of a touchy subject. On one hand you have all kinds of influencers and solo-preneurs sharing how you can build businesses just by using AI tools and get rich quickly. On the other hand, people are cautious about using it for their work both from the fear it could make them replaceable, and because they don’t want to seem lazy or put out low-quality work. In this post I share some practical ways I use ChatGPT that doesn’t compromise my work and allows me to save time and get more done.

Coolest place I visited this weekend
I decided to get out of the city and see another side of India, and I’m so glad I did. Lonavala is a Hill Station about two hours from Mumbai. There are incredible historic and natural sites in the area. My favorite was Lohagad and Visapur forts, which tower imposingly over the plains below. The forts have been occupied by various empires over the last 700+ years and were an amazing sight to see. It was a great reminder to get off the beaten path when traveling. I planned the excursion myself and was the only non-Indian I saw there. The total of around 6 hours getting there and back wasn’t very fun, but it was totally worth it in the end!

That’s all for this week, have a great week folks! I hope you had a great weekend and a productive week ahead.

March 3, 2024
The Top 5 Ways I Use ChatGPT For B2B Marketing

There’s rightly been a lot of hype over the past two years on generative AI and how it can increase productivity and automate parts of your work. You can find countless articles and videos on how to use ChatGPT to come up with business ideas, create content, code, and more. But I think it is a real danger to over-rely on using AI at this stage, it can do amazing things, but the work needs to be carefully checked by a human for accuracy, plus, people are already starting to be able to recognize AI-generated content so it likely needs to be rewritten with a human touch if you have it create complete blog posts or articles.

The key to success is to utilize AI strategically for what it’s good at, but still use some good ol’ fashioned elbow grease to fine-tune the output. In this article, I’m not going to share how to get rich or write a book with AI, but I am going to share real actionable use cases that marketers and others can implement today that save time and produce good results, without compromising the quality of your work.

Brainstorming
ChatGPT is pretty decent at brainstorming with the right prompt, but you will need to be specific to get good results. I find that often the ideas are either too similar with small variations, or on the opposite end, completely out there and not in line with what your original idea was. You need to give a detailed prompt with clear parameters. Pro tip: You can customize ChatGPT by providing some baseline information that it will use when relevant for all your prompts. This saves you from providing background info for each prompt. I suggest you save several versions depending on what you plan on using it for. For work, you can include a description of your target audience, value proposition, and other relevant details that it can pull from.

Research
Rather than searching and visiting many sites you can ask ChatGPT and get the information you need. I do suggest you be very careful with this though, as it can generate incorrect information, so I usually only do this for topics I am already familiar with and will be able to recognize inaccuracies. I find it is very good for thought exercises, and exploring concepts and theories that I have and want to talk through. These may not be important or valid enough to discuss with another person, but using ChatGPT allows me to articulate and flesh out my thoughts and get decent feedback.

Summarizing
This is one of my favorite use cases for ChatGPT. As marketers, we are often creating multiple pieces of content for a single campaign. For example, for a webinar, you may need a description for the landing page, another one for an invitation email, text for a social post, another for direct invites, etc. ChatGPT is very good at helping you come up with different versions, as long as you have a solid version for it to work off of. Again, you need to be precise in your prompt (tone/style, word count, channel, etc) and edit the output, but you can definitely save time in most cases.

Photo by Mojahid Mottakin on Unsplash

Outlines
It is much more useful to use ChatGPT for creating outlines for content like blog posts, rather than having it write the whole thing. You will probably still need to edit and clean up the output (it tends to generate extremely long section titles for example) and ensure everything is compelling and makes sense. So using ChatGPT for outlines can be useful, but until you get used to it, you may end up spending more time fine-tuning than if you just did it yourself. I often have it spit out several versions and then pick and choose what I think would work best.

Repurposing
This is another strong contender for my favorite use case. If you want to repurpose content, turn a blog post into an infographic for example, ChatGPT is very good at pulling out the highlights and formatting them in a way that is good for your new content. You just have to be very exact with your prompt, like telling it not to add anything new. One example of this is when I used an AI transcriber to get a text file of a webinar, and then used ChatGTP to turn that into an article. There was still a lot of work for me to do, I had ChatGPT summarize the talk first and order the key themes into sections, then I went back and expanded on each one, then took those points and wrote an article-style post from it instead of bullet points. But it still saved me probably 4-5 hours of work by using AI instead of doing everything myself.

In conclusion, I think it is important for marketers to start using AI if they don’t want to fall behind. As with any new technology, there will be early adopters and then it will become mainstream and accepted by almost everyone. We are still in the early adoption phase for marketers using ChatGPT in their daily work, so now is the best time to get started. Just don’t fall into the trap of trying to let it do your work for you or you’ll end up with subpar results and be a worse marketer. I hope you try these 5 use cases and let me know how else you use ChatGPT in the comments!

If you liked this post, you may like to read My Simple 5-Step Process For Creating Great B2B Content.

February 29, 2024
The Weekend Wind-Down #1 – February 25, 2024
Hello friends! I’m starting a new project today and am excited to share it with you. I’ve long been a fan of Tim Ferriss, first from his podcast, then books, and over the last few years, his weekly newsletter “5-Bullet Friday”. Tim provides a short curated list of everything from book and music recommendations, to gadget suggestions, poems and quotes to ponder, and more. I love the format of short bite-sized points of interest that are easily digestible and don’t take a lot of time to read.

For my version, I wanted to deliver some value on Sunday evenings as the weekend is winding down and we are preparing for a new week. Especially after having my first kid, weekends can be a blur of activities, errands, and trying to fit in relaxation. We’ve all felt the “Sunday Scaries” when it gets to be late in the day and we wonder where the weekend went. This newsletter will be my way of ending your Sundays with a small dose of valuable curated content: personal and career growth tips, interesting things to ponder, and more. The topics will change from week to week, but in general, I will stick with some core areas that I am focused on in my life, so if you’re anything like me, I think you’ll find it useful. I look forward to taking this journey with you!
1. How I’ve been utilizing ChatGTP this weekend
  I found out that the mobile app has a conversation mode with real-time two-way voice chat. I’ve started using this to practice speaking, answering questions, roleplaying networking, or other times I want to improve my communication. It even transcribes your speech afterward so you can see how many umms and ahs you said! I don’t think you need to learn how to be a “prompt engineer” or take courses to learn how to utilize ChatGTP and other AI tools, it’s more important to think of use cases that benefit you and then improve how you interact with the AI so you get better results.
2. What I focused on this weekend to improve my work
  Planning agendas for syncs and 1:1s! If your calendar is anything like mine, you have a bunch of recurring 1:1s scheduled throughout your week. I’ve committed myself to sharing an agenda with a list of topics to cover before the meeting. This allows me to organize my thoughts and gives the other person a chance to prepare for our meeting. Something basic that I have done on and off, but I believe being consistent about it will really help my meetings be more productive!
3. What I listened to this weekend
  This January Recap Episode of The Time Ferriss Show had a ton of great clips and sparked the idea for this newsletter. The highlight for me was Chris Beresford-Hill‘s discussion on how to come up with great ideas. I found this quote particularly valuable “Time kills all deals, for sure, and it kills momentum and it kills energy.” when discussing making decisions quickly.
4. What I read this weekend
  beehiiv shared the average open rates for all emails sent on their platform in 2023 in this blog post. It was an astonishing 38.7%! I honestly haven’t heard of them before, but with that kind of success, I’m definitely going to pay more attention to what they do and how they help marketers.
5. My most gratifying moment of the weekend
  A friend from the gym where I train jiujitsu, muay thai, strength training, etc. who is earlier in her career, happened to receive a new job offer right before our training session started. She immediately asked for my opinion on the role and company. It was an honor to be able to offer her my view and see that she valued my opinion. Most of us should reflect more on how far we’ve come and realize our experience is valuable and worth sharing with people younger than us.
6. The most interesting post I saw on LinkedIn this weekend
  Wes Kao shared this post on Grammarly’s 2024 State of Business Communication Report and how much miscommunication happens for marketers during their work. Highlights: “Marketers spend 26 hours/week on written communication, which is the most of any team surveyed.” and “Marketers spend 49% more time than the average knowledge worker responding to written communication from others, which is more than any other function.”
That’s all for this week, I hope you had a great weekend and will have an even better week ahead!

-Nicholas Braman

Note: My goal is to eventually move this newsletter to email format which will land in your inbox every Sunday evening (Singapore time). Subscribe here if you want to receive this by email after I make the change.
February 25, 2024
4 Key Trends For Successful B2B Marketing in 2024

Introduction

The year 2024 promises a continuing evolution in the landscape of B2B marketing as businesses gear up to embrace the integration of advanced technologies and a heightened reliance on data-driven insights. At the forefront of this transformation is the pervasive influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI), fundamentally altering the way marketers approach analytics, attribution, and content creation. In this article, I’ll go into the key facets of this evolution, exploring the rise of AI in B2B marketing, as well as other key trends I plan to focus on to take my marketing efforts to the next level over the year.

1. Utilizing AI for Marketers

AI has been a hot topic for a while, but really came into its own over the past year plus, after the public release of ChatGTP. There’s been plenty of scare-mongering articles about AI taking over jobs, but in my opinion, it is the marketers who embrace AI the earliest that will continue to thrive and stay ahead of the curve. Learning to utilize AI to supplement our existing skills and expertise is key to future-proofing your career and workflows. We need to be evolving with AI, rather than avoiding or shunning it. I’ve started using ChatGTP and other AI tools for all kinds of tasks from transcribing interviews to summarizing lengthy text, brainstorming, and more. This saves me time and allows me to focus on more strategic work that elevates our marketing team’s results.

We are all in the learning stages of how to best use AI tools, even though many people are promoting themselves as experts, we are all just starting on this journey. I think it is important for everyone to get hands-on and figure out the best use cases for their own strengths, weaknesses, and daily work flows. It is also vital to learn the limitations of these AI tools and not rely on them without checking their work and modifying it to sound more human and maintain authenticity and brand voice. To fully harness the potential of AI, marketers must integrate these tools into their workflow thoughtfully. In 2024 AI will play a pivotal role in streamlining processes, enhancing creativity, and delivering content that speaks to the audience in a personalized manner for those marketers that learn to leverage it in the right ways.

Photo by Mojahid Mottakin on Unsplash

2. Challenges in Data Analytics and Attribution

Analytics and attribution have been challenges in every role I’ve had and will continue to be an area where B2B marketers can get ahead of the competition if they put a concentrated effort into optimizing these areas. Marketers must grapple with ensuring that the contributions of various touchpoints are correctly assigned and so they can optimize marketing spend and improve ROI. This is a key collaboration point between sales, business development, and marketing teams and success here will help both teams make better strategic decisions and deliver stronger results.

From the marketers I’ve talked to, and within my own experience, currently, most marketing teams are struggling with just getting accurate data to make manual insights. But one area I hope makes progress in 2024 is the integration of AI in marketing automation platforms and CRMs. I can’t wait until these systems can collect, organize, and interpret the data effectively to derive actionable insights with minimal human input.

I will be working on utilizing the AI tools available not only to overcome existing challenges but also to harness the true power of data for strategic impact. The year 2024 holds the promise of a more efficient, insightful, and collaborative future for marketers ready to navigate the challenges and embrace the opportunities presented by the integration of AI in data analytics and attribution.

3. Influencer Collaboration in B2B Marketing

While influencer marketing has long been associated with B2C, it’s gaining traction in the B2B space in 2024. B2B marketers are recognizing the value of collaborating with industry experts, thought leaders and influencers to amplify their brand messaging. Strategic partnerships with influencers can help businesses build credibility, reach a broader audience, and create authentic connections within their industry. This trend involves identifying key influencers in the B2B space and developing meaningful collaborations that go beyond traditional advertising to include thought leadership content, co-hosted events, and joint product promotions.

I first used an influencer for a Microsoft 365 promotion in 2017, and while the results gained were mostly vanity metrics then, this trend has continued to gain steam. Over the past few years, I’ve focused more on gaining customer advocacy and demonstrating social proof to my prospects with good results. I believe one key difference from B2C influencer marketing is the need to find people who love your solution and work on their personal brand, rather than providing someone who already has an audience and convincing them your solution is great. I’ve working on this by providing speaking opportunities, nominating them for awards, having them participate on panels and at roundtables, and more. Continuing to grow these relationships and collaborate with leaders in my target audience community will be key to long-term success.

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

4. Leveling Up In-Person B2B Marketing Events For Increased Engagement

The last trend I see for B2B marketing in 2024 is the need for improving in-person event experiences. In early 2022 when face-to-face events started again after the pandemic I was surprised by how eagerly they were attended. I think people were eager for that form of interaction and starved for networking and human interaction after two years of lockdowns and virtual engagement. However, starting last year I saw that start to slow down, almost as if people burned themselves out going to events and weren’t interested in attending so many. It didn’t help that many organizations, mine included, went all-in on events, and got used to high attendance rates and hungry participants.

Going into next year, I predict that it is not going to be enough just to book a bunch of conferences and show up with some notebooks and pens. Marketing teams will have to rethink their event strategy and the formats they use if they want to get attendees and continued engagement. Not only will it be important to be extremely strategic about which events to invest in, but marketers will also need to be creative in the content they deliver and the interactions they have. Last year I pushed for an increase in small-scale roundtable discussions over large conferences and next year I will be doing even more to move away from slide presentations to more interactive sessions, I think if they want to stand out, other marketing teams will need to do the same.

Conclusion

In conclusion, as we look ahead to the landscape of B2B marketing in 2024, it is evident that embracing the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not just a trend but a necessity for staying competitive. While the initial learning curve exists, the key lies in thoughtful integration, understanding the tools’ limitations, and maintaining authenticity. The marketers who proactively engage with AI, experimenting with its applications and learning from hands-on experiences, are poised to thrive in an era where data-driven insights and creative augmentation become indispensable.

Finally, the trends of influencer collaboration and reimagining in-person events underscore the evolving nature of B2B marketing. Building authentic relationships with influencers and adopting innovative event formats are keys to success in 2024, as marketers navigate an environment where credibility, engagement, and strategic creativity take center stage. In embracing these key trends, B2B marketers can position themselves for a future marked by efficiency, insightfulness, and creative success.

December 28, 2023
5 Ways to Get The Most Out Of Marketing Interns

Over the course of my career, I’ve had the chance to mentor interns in several different roles. I’ve also had full-time employees reporting to me, but I feel the role of mentoring interns is a bit different, so today I want to dive into the lessons I’ve learned and the best ways I found to make their internships productive for both of us. In Singapore, it is common for university students to have multiple internships of 3-6 months before they graduate, so it can be a great way to supplement your team while you are in the growth phase. Longer internships are definitely better, but if you follow these lessons, you can feel great even about shorter time frames.

Utilize their strengths
Although interns don’t come in with much work experience, they do have transferrable skills from school that you can put to use on day one. I’ve found that research and writing projects are especially good to start with because not only will the intern be able to learn about your industry and solution at the same time as doing the work, it is also an easy kind of project to monitor and provide feedback on. I’ve had all of my interns research and write blog posts as some of their first tasks, and eventually, they even came up with topics I hadn’t thought of before. Competitor research was another area that I had interns work on, and since something like a battlecard has a fixed format, it is easy for them to replicate.

Let them try a variety of projects
I’ve heard from my interns that in some experiences, they get tasked with doing the same thing, like data entry for the whole internship. That’s not an ideal situation for anyone. First of all, if they are bored and feel under-utilized, they won’t be motivated to do good work. Secondly, you should be fair to your interns and give them a chance to learn new skills while they work with you, not just pass off work that no one else wants to do. Thirdly, as interns are new to the working world, neither of you knows what their strengths are or what they might excel at. I had one intern who I started having edit videos, and even though she had never done it before, ended up doing an amazing job.

Leverage their new perspectives
Interns come in with fresh eyes and a different outlook than other employees. If you play your cards right, you can translate that into new ideas and ways of doing things that break the mold of what you’ve already been doing. Since it will likely be the first time they are doing a lot of tasks, they can come up with out-of-the-box ideas that we have blinders to, just because “it’s always been done that way”. In one of my roles, we had a lot of customer queries coming in, we had a system in place to rotate the responses, and it worked well enough, so we hadn’t bothered to improve it. After a few weeks on the job, a new intern came to me with an idea to streamline the process and make everything more trackable, after working out a few kinks with her, we gave it a shot and it worked great.

Provide guidance, not instructions
When you’re experienced at doing something, it is hard not to tell someone you are mentoring exactly what to do step-by-step. But doing that isn’t going to get you the best results, and it isn’t good for your intern’s development either. It is much better to provide the goal, the parameters of what you need the outcome to be, some suggestions on how to get started, and then let them go to work. Check in regularly to answer questions and provide feedback if needed, but don’t micro-manage, let them figure things out on their own. During the pandemic I had an intern who I tasked with creating paid ad campaign reports, I showed her an example of what I had been using, let her spend some time on training resources, and told her how I was using the reports, and sent her off. Within a few iterations, she had more comprehensive and readable reports than before, and we were able to make some critical decisions based on what they showed.

Create opportunities to work with different teams
I view an internship as a two-way street, you are getting the benefit of an extra pair of hands without the cost of another headcount, and they are getting experience and exposure in a role they wouldn’t qualify for full-time. I feel I owe them the opportunity to see different parts of the business and learn how other teams work, not just keep them stuck in a marketing bubble. This will help them later on in their career and may even change their career path. In marketing there are always good opportunities to collaborate with sales, business development, product, and customer teams. By having interns involved in projects with some of these teams they will not only be able to better understand how marketing impacts the business, they will also see what other functions they might be interested in, and give those teams fresh perspectives as well!

So these are the best lessons I’ve learned about making marketing internships most beneficial for both sides. I hope you learned something and have success with your future interns!

September 1, 2023
My Simple 5-Step Process For Creating Great B2B Content

Creating content has always been one of my favorite aspects of being a B2B marketer. It hasn’t ever been the main focus of any of my roles, but I have always done some content creation as part of my work, and I believe every good marketer should make it part of their repertoire of skills. Whether it is writing a blog or social media post, creating a video, planning a presentation or event, or designing an infographic, I’ve come up with a 5-step process that makes it easier and delivers the best results. I’m going to share that process with you today, plus a bonus step, that will make your next content creation your best yet!

Step 1: What is my goal?

To create a good piece of content, you need to start with the end in mind. Your goal could be to educate, entice, or convince your audience. Or it could be something more broad like to get as many views as possible or get them to sign up for something. The goal you choose will help to refine your topic, what format you use, your tone of voice, the length of the content, and many other elements. It is important to start with this step before doing a lot of work, or you may have to start all over again.

Step 2: Who is my audience?

Determining who your audience is will help you create content that resonates with them and has the most impact. Are you creating for a highly knowledgeable audience or laymen who don’t have any background on the topic? What age or seniority are they? That will influence your tone of voice and the language you use. This also extends to deciding where in your funnel your audience is. Will it be the first time they are seeing your content or do they already know all about you and are in the decision phase? Once you decide which audience you are targeting, you can cater your content to be more valuable to them.

Step 3: What is my topic?

This is the step that most people start with, but I believe you will produce better content if you wait until you answer the first two questions before you pick your topic. Sure, you may have a broad idea of what area you want to cover, but the details of the subject, how you will frame it, and exactly what info you will include should only come at this stage. If you haven’t gone through the first two steps before you pick your topic, decide on an outline, and start creating, you’ll either end up with content that doesn’t meet your or your audience’s needs or you’ll have to spend a lot of effort redoing things.

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina 🇺🇦 on Unsplash

Step 4: What do I want them to do next?

This step will help you craft your narrative and call to action. But driving your audience towards the next step isn’t as simple as throwing in one sentence at the end of your article or linking to another resource. The entire piece of content should be shaped to push them towards the next step that you think will benefit them the most. Remember, this isn’t about you, but about them taking away value from your content and wanting to learn more about how you can help them.

Step 5: How am I going to promote this?

I don’t think most marketers will forget this important step, but it is easy to just go through the motions without really strategizing how to best promote this particular piece of content. But you should really think about the best way to promote your content to your audience to meet the goal you have set in the previous steps. This will also affect the creation process and give you a head start once you are ready for promotion. If you work within a big marketing team, not all campaigns or assets will be promoted on every single channel the company owns. Determining where and how you will deliver the content will help you cater it to best suit where it will be published.

Bonus step: How can I turn this content into other formats?

You may have noticed one step missing in this process, deciding what format you are going to create your content in. That’s because I believe it doesn’t matter which one you start with, you should be creating all your content in multiple formats. Leverage the work you’ve put in to create your content and deliver it in different mediums. People prefer or learn best from different ways, some people would like to read, while others are more visual. So take advantage of this and make an impact with as much of your audience as possible. For example, I’ve turned this article into an easy-to-read infographic below!

I hope you will try these steps next time you are creating content and see how it improves your process and helps you deliver more value to your audience!

August 26, 2023
Thriving in B2B Marketing: 5 Functions and What I Enjoy About Them

Having been in tech/SaaS marketing for 8 years I have worn many hats and used a variety of strategies and tactics to build marketing campaigns and support my sales team to build pipeline and grow the business. As I reflect on the different areas I realize that these 5 are the most distinct and all have different aspects that make me love my work. If you are just starting your career in marketing, or are planning your progression and what areas you want to get experience in next, hopefully, this will be useful to you. Of course, depending on the size of the organization and the scope of the role, most marketers will be doing some work in all of these areas. So let’s dig into it!

Content Marketing

What is it?

Most B2B marketers won’t be dancing on TikTok or Instagram, but there is still a wide range of useful content to get in front of your target audience. This could be whitepapers, ebooks, videos, presentations, webinars, case studies, podcasts, and blog posts. All of these assets support your funnel and allow prospects to learn more about the problems you solve and your solution as they consider your product more deeply.

What do I enjoy?

What I enjoy about content marketing is that you need to really understand your customer, what their pain points are, what considerations or concerns they might have, and what they are looking for in a solution. You also need to develop thought leadership content that attracts people before they even know what your solution is, you don’t want to be shoving a sales pitch down their throat the first time they are exposed to you. It is a great challenge to come up with really good content that allows you to attract customers and gently lead them to the conclusion that you can help them.

Example:

My favorite piece of content that I have produced was a research report based on a survey of over 400 IT leaders across APAC. The report gave IT service providers (my target audience at the time) insights into their customer’s thinking, what they were investing in, what support they sought from IT service providers, where they thought improvements or new offerings could be made and more. This was a new challenge for me to develop as we had to design the survey to get the data we needed, and then make key insights that were valuable to the readers from that. The end result was a completely original report that the readers wouldn’t be able to get from other sources.

Channel Marketing

What is it?
In the tech world, the ecosystem of partners, alliances, and resellers is complex. But ideally, these partnerships are to everyone’s benefit. The solution providers get more exposure to new customers, and the customers get access to complimentary solutions that help their businesses. Channel marketing at its best can bring to light synergies and deepen the impact you can have on your customers. This is often in the form of co-branded campaigns, joint events, and event content developed together that shows why if someone is using one of your solutions, they will get even more benefits from integrating a partner solution.

What do I enjoy?

Channel marketing allows you to get out of your bubble and see the bigger picture from your customer’s point of view. Every organization has a tech stack where they are using many different solutions for different parts of their business and sometimes it’s easy to become ultra-focused on your own product and forget there’s a wider world out there. I also love that you get to work with fellow marketers from other organizations, collaborating and learning from each other can be really refreshing and give you new ideas for other areas of your marketing.

Example:

I participated in a joint marketing program by Microsoft and a group of resellers as an advisor. This program was great because although everyone was offering Microsoft solutions and in competition with each other, the collaboration, teamwork, and pooled resources made the ROI better for everyone than if they had done things on their own. We were also able to experiment with new tactics like influencer marketing that we wouldn’t likely have done otherwise.

Photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash

Digital Marketing

What is it?

Digital marketing didn’t start at the beginning of the internet revolution but has gradually evolved as free-to-use platforms like Google search and Facebook needed to bring in revenue and the sheer number of users made it possible for business of all kinds to get their ads in front of their target demographics. With the amount of time most people spend in front of screens these days, it is essential for businesses to utilize these platforms

What do I enjoy?

The bottom line with digital is that everything is measurable, you can see exactly what is working and what isn’t. It takes some work to set things up correctly, but when done right you can see all your metrics at a very granular level. It’s also easy to pivot and split test digitally, and you can optimize your campaigns easily as you go. With offline ads, it’s almost impossible to measure the impact and it takes much longer to make any changes.

Example:

In a previous role, I was working on a new product launch and leading the entire paid ad strategy and execution. I decided to try a new platform I’d never used before, Reddit, in addition to the standard LinkedIn and Google campaigns. This turned out to be the best-performing platform and really demonstrated to me how important it is to keep testing and trying new things.

Event Marketing

What is it?

This one is self-explanatory, but in B2B marketing, events can run from small workshops and training sessions, webinars, big exhibitions and conferences, executive roundtables, hosting customers at sporting events, and anything else you can imagine.

What do I enjoy?

For me the best part about events is getting to know your customers, I’m not in meetings with customers every day, so events are really a chance for me to get to know my target audience better. I can then bring that knowledge and understanding back to help shape my other marketing campaigns. It’s also fun to be creative with events and make them memorable for the attendees.

Example:

The biggest event I have run was a 2-day conference with over 500 attendees and 20 sponsors. I was in charge of the full spectrum, from the planning and pitching to sponsors, to logistics/venue/food, arranging the content and track sessions, driving registrations, and everything in between. It ended up a huge success and led to an even bigger event in the following years for the first time in our region.

Field Marketing

What is it?

Field marketing can mean different things depending on the organization, but in my past two roles, it has meant I’m the mini CMO for my region. I’m in charge of the marketing strategy, budget, plan, and execution for everything. Depending on the team structure there are other people supporting you either in the region or often at a global office with product marketing, operations, analytics, etc. But the field marketer is the person who needs to localize the marketing strategy and coordinate with the other teams.

What do I enjoy?

As a field marketer it is vital to work hand-in-hand with the sales team, marketing and sales depend on each other for success. I enjoy this because I can see my direct impact on pipeline generation and new customers and really know that I am helping to grow the business. I also enjoy aligning my marketing strategy with the GTM plan and making sure all of the marketing activities I’m doing are working together.

Example:

At the end of one year, we had a huge shift in direction from a global level on what types of customers we were going to go after. It meant a lot of changes in all aspects of our marketing strategy and the need to be perfectly in line with who the sales team wanted to target. But by working closely with them and adjusting our plans we were able to bring in even better results than the previous year.

So that’s very briefly what I enjoy about these 5 areas of B2B marketing and how they contribute to me looking forward to work every day. There are so many areas and things I didn’t touch on in this article, but that’s why I enjoy marketing so much, there’s a huge variety in the work I do. I think it’s important to be a well-balanced marketer with experience in many areas, but deeper expertise in some. And I look forward to continuing to grow my expertise as time goes on!

August 26, 2023