Scandinavia’s no. 1 international B2B marketing blog

Keeping a close eye on your communications

While we are all adapting to doing business and maintaining close relationships with our stakeholders from a distance, there are, of course, some factors that make connecting and communicating with people challenging.

But maintaining transparency and compassion through communications can help you stay top-of-mind for customers, clients, partners and employees alike. How can you ensure this?

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Why thought leadership is (still) pivotal for big industry

“There’s a seat for everyone at the Thought Leadership table,” says Morten Floee Knudsen, Thought Leadership Content Manager at global engineering company FLSmidth. In a highly competitive market with discerning buyers, thought leadership is an important tool in the B2B marcomms toolset.

“People can be intimidated,” said Morten Floee Knudsen, when I asked him about thought leadership as a marketing mechanism in heavy industry.

“The idea of spending resources on creating or sharing inspiring, thought-provoking content that does not talk about your product and won’t sell products tomorrow can be a scary thought. But raising issues and debating broader industry challenges show that you care, that you take ownership of the market, and that you speak the same language as your customers.

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Have you forgotten what thought leadership is truly about?

Boy shouting into a microphone, making an announcement

Public service announcement: this serves as a gentle reminder for why you set about adopting thought leadership in the first place.

If you work in a B2B company and haven’t yet implemented a content marketing strategy with a thought leadership undertone, then you are way behind. While not a novel concept (it came to a head around eight years ago), not all B2B companies have adopted the approach. On the other hand, some have been doing it for years.

For old time’s sake, let’s revisit the definition of thought leadership:

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Why it’s worthwhile to be an industry advocate – or 8 reasons to stop talking about yourself!

Person with open mouth talking into a can - being an industry advocate

Shifting the perspective of your communications and taking on the role of an industry advocate can bring many benefits for your company. Offering customers valuable, objective advice on your industry can boost your credibility, website traffic, social media engagement – and give you better sales leads.

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Powering up your value proposition

Is it time to get clearer on exactly why customers should prefer your company?There can be many attributes for which a product, service or entire company wants to be known: Fastest, cheapest, best quality, most features, most reliable, perfect for a specific situation, trusted, great customer service and more – the list of possibilities is endless.  Continue reading

Buzz Watch 2/5: Advocacy Marketing

In my previous post, in an effort to clear up some of the confusion in the way new terms are being used in the industry, I discussed what Account-based Marketing (ABM) was all about. This time, I’ll attempt to define advocacy marketing.

Advocacy marketing generally describes the idea of promoting (advocating) a product or service, typically where people or brands act as a third party to encourage prospects to buy. The overarching aim is to create trust in your product and your brand, based on the principle that people tend to trust the opinions of those they perceive to be similar to themselves – or to be independent experts in a specific field. Advocacy marketing can be used both to acquire new customers and increase loyalty with existing ones. Continue reading

Marketing technology and the challenges it brings for B2B

Considering the rate at which technology is advancing, it’s a fool’s errand to try to stay in front of the latest developments. Most marketers are more concerned with staying on board with the latest, but that can be pretty confusing too when there are so many concerns on the table. A vocabulary rich in buzzwords won’t get the job done, nor will a whole suite of sophisticated marketing tools that nobody knows how to use properly.

So, for the small- to medium-size business with limited marketing resources, what are some concerns to focus on? Continue reading

Youtube and video content marketing

Youtube released this great video a while back announcing its users now upload 60 hours of footage per minute and watch more than 4bn videos each day. With this much content being uploaded constantly, one could be forgiven for assuming that none of it gets watched, but it has been revealed that individual videos on Youtube are viewed on average 300-400 times. In this post, we examine the importance of Youtube for video content marketing projects and some of the things to keep in mind when using it. Continue reading