Funnel 2011 B2B inbound marketing lessons
Posted by Simon Gregory on Wed, Nov 02, 2011
Yesterday’s FUNNEL conference in London had some scorching content. The streamed event addressed trends in B2B marketing: how to best attract, engage, nurture and convert leads into ‘sales-ready’ leads. Here are some of the shiny nuggets I stole.
Alison Jones from Coast Digital explained the importance of understanding the psychographic rather than the demographic when content marketing. The demographic may say that company X operates in the software sector, employs 100 people and is based in London. That’s not very useful for marketers. Far better to understand the needs of the company’s people and the attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles, then to write content that dovetails with this. Not rocket science, but it’s the basis for content marketing.
Ian Harris from Search Laboratory spoke about global search engine marketing. You can’t simply translate terms such as ‘car hire’, he noted, as different cultures use words in different ways at different times. Furthermore, instead of one keyword, you may need to seed two or three to ensure the search engines pick up what your content’s about. You also have to be careful when using pictures: a group of people clustered round a shared teleconference screen may play well in Baltimore, but might seem odd in Paris, where people tend to teleconference individually. And never use the headline ‘Did you know?’ when marketing to the French: it comes across as insulting!
Our sister company IM Europa delivers pan-European inbound marketing programmes, often for US companies hoping to break into Europe, so it was interesting to hear Ian’s take on the challenges: we've found similar things.
The excellent John Watton, who runs global brand and marketing for the Expedia Affiliate Network, underlined the importance of creativity and humour. Your brand and content has to be distinctive and relevant, he said - and it has to be confident. One of the best ways to show confidence is to share data and information with others. At Strange, we’ve been saying this for some time. The more you can share useful information, the more people will trust you – and trust is critical for sales.
Irwin Hipsman, director of Customer Community at Brainshark, spoke about using mobile and video to generate leads and revenue. Video is very effective: click-through rates are up to three times higher than for traditional text-based material. But much visual content is too lengthy, he said. Why not put up a crisp 90-second video, making it clear from the start how long it was? Anyone can spare 90 seconds. Webinars, too, typically last an hour – and that’s a big chunk of someone’s day. Why not run a 15-minute webinar, then distribute it using social media?
All good ideas. Some interesting conversations with delegates, too. I asked a marketing guy from a big retail bank how he was using social media. “We’re not,” he said gloomily. “Nobody has anything nice to say about their bank. Our Facebook Wall would be a nightmare – and the regulations would mean we couldn’t always respond...”
- Were you at FUNNEL 2011? What did you think?