Eric Schwartzman

It’s not the best business that wins.  It’s the one with the best marketing.

Which means that marketing -- digital marketing specifically during this lousy pandemic -- has become the single most important way to survive and thrive. 

After all, it’s marketing’s job to communicate value, generate leads, bring in, and win new clients. 

Without clients, you don’t have a business, you just have a really expensive hobby.

To be truly successful at B2B marketing, you may want to enlist the help of a dedicated digital marketing specialist.

But finding and hiring someone for your business can be a challenge.

https://youtu.be/yrnnDKt57VU

To help startups, change-ups, and scale-ups find and hire the right freelancer or agency, I spoke with Adam Erhart, a YouTube marketing specialist, course creator, and educator. 

Adam has also amassed over 45,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel, The Marketing Show, where he shares marketing strategies and best practices.

I asked him, “how does a company hire a digital marketing consultant?” And here’s what he said.

Download this chart here

Learn the marketing basics before hiring 

Before you even begin your search for help with digital marketing, you need to get the basics down yourself. 

Here’s the deal: if you need an expert content agency, you will pay top dollar. 

And you get what you pay for. 

So until you can afford the big digital marketing guns, the onus is on you to know how to write a basic headline, know a bit about email marketing, understand sales copy, and know when to deploy owned, earned, shared, and paid media channels. 

You must buy the books, hire the coaches, and do the courses….to be the strategist yourself.

Don’t rely on a digital marketer as a crutch because you don’t want to learn something. Think of it like this:

Startup, no budget >> You become that person. You don’t have money, so you have to spend time becoming your own digital marketing specialist.

Change-up, small budget >> In search of a product-market fit, you are in pivot mode trying to light a fire that can catch wind and take off.

Scale-up, medium budget >> You follow the steps laid out here to find the right person with the digital marketing specialty skills you need, so you can spend money, not time, trying to figure it out.

Grown-up, big budget >> You have a team on in-house marketers and outside agencies maintaining and growing market share.

Download this chart here

Follow that logic and, when it is time for you to hire an individual or agency, you will also be equipped with enough know-how to effectively manage the relationship.

How to become your own digital marketing expert

The world of digital marketing is broad. You have content marketing experts, paid advertising pros, SEO consultants, PPC...it can all be overwhelming. 

Adam assures us that anyone can do marketing, but they DO need to dedicate the time, energy, and money toward studying it.

Even after 10 years of being a professional digital marketing consultant, he spends a minimum of one hour each day dedicated to learning. 

Top tips for keeping your marketing skills current:

Learn how to establish a target market

Know what market research looks like -- and how to do it

Experiment with Google Ads and Facebook Ads

Read some books on marketing such as Alchemy, 80/20 Sales and Marketing, and everything by Seth Godin

Learn the basics of copywriting and email marketing

Dabble in social media 

Understand your business, your offer, your market, and the unique value you provide

Create a YouTube channel and invest in other video marketing efforts

Yes, you read that last one right! 

According to Adam, one of the best platforms for generating leads, even for B2Bs, is YouTube. 

If it’s not from a direct referral, almost all his leads come from his channel. 

But he has taken the time to figure out where his audience was hanging out. Turns out, even top CEOs turn to YouTube to learn how to do things. 

Then, he invested even more time into learning video marketing tactics and growing his channel.

“You’ve got to eat an elephant one bite at a time.”

The takeaway here is that it takes more than just books or putting some videos on YouTube to see marketing success. You have to be willing to play the long game. You can get a strong handle on basic marketing principles in a few months. 

Then, as your revenue grows, you can start looking for a digital marketing expert.

How to hire a digital marketing specialist

As I mentioned, anyone can do marketing. But when you are seeking out a digital marketing expert you aren’t just looking for competency, you want mastery.

1. Look for a deep level of marketing experience

The only way to gain digital marketing mastery is through years of seeing and executing many different marketing tactics. Seeing that someone has spent time in different industries, using multiple media channels is usually a good sign that they’ve been able to test their expertise in many different scenarios.

To find this person, start asking your network for referrals and look for digital marketing specialists other companies have used with success -- and who practice what they preach.

2. Get specific, niche down on a target segment 

Though you want someone with a wide breadth of experience in the past, you should pick a specialist over a generalist every day. 

Let’s face it. No one knows more about your business than you. So if you’re at a start-up or change-up, possibly even scale-up, you’re your own best generalist.

Specificity is always important in marketing. There might be something specific to your industry that a general digital marketing consultant just wouldn’t know or understand.

3. Decide between growth or profit

Know what your objective is. And remember: growth sucks up your profit.  

There are many different approaches to marketing -- and that’s okay. But you simply need to make sure it’s something that aligns with you.

If you are focusing on growth marketing, you may lose profit due to extra media and advertising spend. But, if you are very aggressive with your content and media strategy, you can double your yearly profits. 

You’re simply going to have to prioritize one over the other when initially looking for a digital marketing specialist.

Here's my favorite book on Growth Marketing.

4. Have a working funnel before hiring

A digital marketing specialist is not a magic bullet. They know exactly how to create a winning formula for your business, but you need to make sure you have a proven system when they start filling that funnel.

Traffic is easy. You can buy it for pennies. It’s EVERYWHERE.That is never the issue. The offer and the quality of that traffic is. 

You need to make sure you have a high-converting offer that resonates with your client. 

“We don’t need to throw gas on wet logs. We need the fire running first so that we can amplify it with the ads, with the content...otherwise you’re just flushing your money down the toilet.” 

A digital marketing specialist doesn’t have the authority to tell you what the market wants. We need to put together a strategy and put it out in the world and then look at the numbers.

5. Look for someone who is platform agnostic

SEO doesn’t work for everyone. Neither do Facebook ads.

It’s important to find a digital marketing specialist that is willing to go wherever you get results, not necessarily where you or they WANT to go. 

Breaking into a new channel? Understand and appreciate that you have to hang out and spend time on the channel first.

Remember that B2B marketers and business owners are just people. They ARE using Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. People in B2B marketing tend to overlook that.

And what about off-shoring your marketing efforts?

Well, not surprisingly, it depends on the person.

 The trick is that you hire for very specific tasks. Because as I already mentioned,  a digital marketing specialist who is an expert strategist is going to be top dollar. 

They are putting together your approach, your hook, your messaging, figuring out your strategy, and your ideal buyer persona.

For example, if you're selling technology, you start with a CTO persona. Justinmind has a bunch of good persona building templates.

Download this chart here

The tactical executors can then easily be outsourced, often for pennies on the dollar.

But you need to be very specific about the task you are looking for. And, as a business owner, you need to be responsible for the overall strategy.

Where to find a digital marketing specialist or agency

Where can this elusive digital marketing specialist be found?

As I mentioned, it’s time to tap your network and try to see if there is anyone your friends or colleagues recommend. Read forums, read online reviews, dig through websites.

Then, when you find a digital marketing specialist, look at their YouTube channels, Instagram accounts, and Facebook accounts. See if they are posting anything at all, and whether or not the content they have resonates with you.

You want someone you connect with on the deepest level and you want to make sure your digital marketing specialist will make your business their business. 

If you want to leverage YouTube for B2B marketing, Adam Erhart is a pro.

If you’re a startup, tech or SaaS company, I’m a  full-stack, digital marketing consultant myself, and certainly open to discussing your business needs. 

I have a cluster of coaching programs that are good for marketers looking to sharpen their content marketing, SEO and digital pr skills. 

Conclusion

Digital marketing is not one-size-fits-all. The way you choose to Market your products and services online depends on where you are in your evolution.

There are no accidents in life. Everything happens for a reason.

Viral content marketing can be explained by the laws of science. But first, we need to look at our culture. When presenting a persuasive argument, Western education stresses a reliance on science, reason, and logic.

But it turns out, that’s the wrong formula for viral content marketing.

The reality is, we make decisions based on our emotions, which we rationalize based on information.

Facts are not what persuade us. Sure, facts may be inform your viral content. And you can certainly have persuasive viral content that includes facts.

But the real secret to creating viral content marketing that reaches millions is more about striking an emotional chord and reinforcing it with persuasive language to make it memorable. In viral content marketing, that means coupling emotionally charged stories and A/B testing to discover clickworthy headlines that drive traffic. 

But how do we do that? And how do we replicate those results time and time again? What's the rubrick for scientific content creation?

While some chalk viral marketing up to chance, Joseph Romm PhD,  former acting asst. secretary at the US Dept. of Energy and 6x best-selling author has documented the patterns behind what kind of content marketing goes viral, and what doesn't.

Understanding the art of creating something that’s “clicky and sticky” is what Joe Romm has dedicated his career to. 

How to Go Viral and reach Millions by Joseph Romm is a must read for cotent marketers.

Discussing some of the takeaways from his must read book: How to Go Viral and Reach Millions on a recent podcast episode, he shared some tried-and-true ways to make creative content marketing assets sticky and clicky.

Science of Viral Content Marketing 

It is the ego that drives our desire to be win arguments. We all want our words to be influential and persuasive. But the people who have succeeded at that strategically understood the history of human communication.

Reading and writing are relatively new concepts. Before Gutenberg's movable-type printing system, computers, iPhones and Google, most people were illiterate. 

In those days, we learned through word-of-mouth. 

Storytellers of the past played on our emotions to help people remember those stories and, ultimately, to try and bring us over to their way of thinking. 

The three emotions most likely to lodge information into our memories are:

Awe

Anger

Anxiety 

To go viral, you need to illicit one of these emotions, and you need to do it in your headline. Because the reality in the digital world is that most of the content you create today will disappear without ever being read.

The headline, on the other hand, is quite likely to get read. Our perceptions are driven by sound bites or viral content that few ever actually read.

Nineteen out of 20 blog posts are not read past the headline.

What’s Remembered is Believed 

As a marketer, it’s your job to know how to tell stories. 

Going back to Romm's foundational idea here, it’s not the facts that make people believe what you are saying. It’s how well they remember it. 

Start with a deep understanding of who you're talking to. Then, take these 3 steps to create memorable, viral content:

Tell a story

Use figures of speech like rhyme, repetition and metaphors

Trigger one of the three memorable emotions 

Even if you understand the science of viral content marketing, you still have to test. What people will click on and what they actually do, is unpredictable.

Fortunately (or unfortunately), we live in an era when we can use technology to show us what really works, fast and easy.

5 Things to Include in Your Viral Content

Viral content marketing agencies use persuasive language (aka rhetoric), which was created by the ancient Greeks for the purpose of persuading juries in a courtroom. 

This was long before the age of enlightenment, when scientific evidence became available and we chose to embrace facts over rhetoric – which had been the cornerstone of Elizabethean education – began to atrophy, at least for everyone outside of politics.

But for online influencers today, rhetoric is a somewhat mysterious, misunderstood skill. And it is the key to creating viral content. 

Think back to attorney Johny Cochran's famous line in the OJ Simpson trial, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.” 

You might think that courtroom proceedings would be based on logic, but the rhetoric of Johnnie Cochran's phrase was cemented into the minds of the jurors, seeding doubt in their minds with one simple, powerful rhyme. 

To improve your likelihood of creating truly viral content marketing, here’s what you should remember:

How to Make Viral Content - 5 Tips

1. Short Words Win 

Did you know that the average word length in Shakespeare’s Hamlet is 3.99 characters?

I’m bringing that up because Shakespeare is arguably one of the most well-known viral content creators of all time. 

It’s clear he understood that big words are less persuasive and less memorable than simple ones.

Now, think of some of the most iconic advertising and political lines and slogans in more modern history: 

“I have a dream…”

“Just do it.”

“Have it your way”

“GOT MILK?”

“The Few, The Proud”

“Axis of Evil”

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”

“Just Say No”

“No Child Left Behind”

Make America Great Again

Build Back Better

One and two-syllable words are able to create a deeper emotional connection, making them more memorable, and more viral.

2. Repetition Rules

If you do a quick search on YouTube for the most viewed videos of all time, you’ll see that most, if not all, of them are pop songs.

That’s because their repetitive nature was DESIGNED to be remembered. For better or worse, depending on your musical taste.

But music producers and songwriters don’t just repeat choruses, lines, and rhymes in each song. You’ll probably recognize certain chords and general sounds that are used repeatedly from song to song and performer to performer.

Repeating small, recognizable parts of one song in another helps us create a natural, almost instant affinity toward it. It uses something familiar to introduce something new so that it doesn’t feel so strange and novel to us that we don’t keep listening.

Another widely-adopted example of successful repetition is in the bible.

“And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. And God saw that the light was good.” (Gen. 1:3-4)

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)

Repetition makes these verses more memorable and, thus, believable. 

In your viral content marketing, you can repeat words, ideas, sounds, letters, or ends of words (as in rhymes) to drive home your marketing message. 

Let’s take a closer look at two more ways you can use repetition for viral marketing.

3. Alliteration Acquires Attention

Alliteration is really another form of repetition. I

For those not familiar with the term, alliteration is the use of the same letter or sound at the beginning of words. 

Copywriters use this technique frequently to come up with memorable marketing campaign slogans. Like repetition, alliteration gets used mostly in headlines, which are what get read mostly anyway.

It’s no coincidence that some of the most memorable business names out there use alliteration. 

Bed, Bath and Beyond

Best Buy

Chuck E Cheese

Dunkin’ Donuts

Krispy Kreme

Gold’s Gym

...the list goes on and on. 

Similarly, using rhyme and alliteration in headlines is a great way to break through the clutter. 

 4. Headlines are the Best Time to Rhyme 

Rhymes aren’t just for pop songs or sonnets.

You probably used them as a kid to remember new concepts in school, like “I before E, except after C.”

Rhymes are one of the most powerful ways of remembering things. 

And if you keep your eyes open, you’ll start to notice they are in many more things than you may have thought - like school books, songs, poetry, and yes, that viral Facebook post you just watched. 

Joe mentioned research conducted on the impact of rhymes on perceptions.

The study took two lines that had the same meaning, but were conveyed with different words. The researchers wanted to know which one was more believable.

They were...

“Woes unite foes.”

“Woes unite enemies.”

Can you guess which one won?

Despite both these sentences having the same meaning, the study showed that the first one was more believable. 

Use these first 4 viral content creation tips to learn how to write good headlines for blog. Here’s 3 examples of blog headlines that use rhyme, repetition and alliteration:

When Mapping the B2B Customer Journey, Your Mission Given is Data-Driven

3 Ways Digital Proximity Impacts Content, Conversions and Commerce

Are Sentiment Analysis Algorithms Accurate?

Pro Tip: If you’re drawing a blank when it comes to using rhymes in your viral content marketing, check out Rhyme Zone. The site helps you find rhyming words and phrases, as well as search popular sayings from songs and literature.

5. Metaphors are Memorable

The process of decoding a metaphor is memorable. They call to mind a visual image we use to make a figurative connection between the two things. 

Here are some popular uses of metaphors Joe shared that we’ve probably all heard: 

“All the world’s a stage.” 

“Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.” 

“The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want.”

“Always be yourself. Unless you can be Batman. Then, always be Batman.”

How Metaphors Make Online Viral Go Content

A good majority of people are visual learners, and metaphors often use visualization to get a point across.

While B2B lead generation has changed a lot since the Rolodex days, one thing has remained the same - word of mouth. If you want to translate the world of media into word of mouth, people have to be able to remember your message. 

And people remember information best if it’s conveyed in a story.

Storytelling in marketing has always been crucial. After all, as humans, we’re programmed to remember stories more than facts. 

So, how do you tell a business-related story well?

To learn how to strengthen your brand storytelling muscles, there’s no one better to consult than Ron Ploof. 

Ron is the author of Edison Effect: Success Strategies for the Information Age.

He also develops tools that help you with your brand storytelling. His The StoryHow™ PitchDeck has some great tips on developing persuasive storytelling that converts awareness into purchase consideration. 

4 keys of brand storytelling in B2B markets

The art of storytelling marketing boils down to 4 essential keys. For better B2B lead generation, you should: 

1. Use proverbs

In a B2B market, building relationships with customers early and often -- before they are in a buying mindset -- is important. 

Let’s turn that into a proverb: “Purchasing decisions are best before budgets.” 

Proverbs make your brand memorable. 

To make your own, you can do a Google search for existing proverbs, and create derivatives of them.

For example: “A spoonful of story helps the data go down.” 

Did you recite that in a sing-song voice in your head? That’s the power of storytelling.

2. Use persuasive selling techniques

Customers won’t buy your product just because you are the biggest company in your market. You need to use persuasive sales enablement techniques. 

Persuasive selling helps people see their needs in full color and shows how your product or service is the best thing for those needs. 

In the words of Aristotle: “In order to persuade...you need logos, pathos, and ethos.” 

Logos = logic, facts

Ethos = credibility, ethics

Pathos = passion

Customers don’t buy on facts alone. In fact, deciding which products or services to purchase -- even in the B2B world -- is often driven by emotion. 

You may be working with enterprise accounts, but you are still working with people. And people buy based on emotion, only then justifying that purchase with logic. 

So, the core focus of business storytelling should be forming an emotional connection with the reader.

3. Match the message to the media

Having a great message isn’t enough. You need to match your message to the right form of media.

Practice brand storytelling with short blog posts. 

Then, if the customer connects with that message, turn the post into a whitepaper or a longer-form ebook. 

If the story could be told in a visual format, use video. 

Think about which format or medium will give the story the most impact and lasting power in the minds of your customers.

4. Make your customer the hero

First, you need to find a story that resonates with your ideal customer. 

Then, you can worry about where it fits into the marketing funnel. 

Ask yourself: 

What are the roles? - You, your customer, competitors

What are the events? - Tradeshow, newsletter, etc.

What are the influences? - What does each of your roles want? 

Make the customer the most important role. If they see themselves in the story, they are self-qualifying.

Think of your customer as King Arther, and the service you provide as Excalibur. You and your brand (no matter how big) are just one little part of the customer’s story.

At the end of the day, storytelling marketing is all about having empathy for your audience. 

They don’t care about you, they care about what you can do for them. 

So, make your customer the main character or create a proverb that feels so natural and catchy to them that they can’t forget your brand. You can re-tell customer success stories to help create a real-life scenario your audience may be experiencing.

Once they recognize themselves in the story and see the result the person achieved, they will want that same result for themselves -- and will have more confidence that your brand is the one to help them get it.

This is a quick, but impactful way to transform the messaging you are already using in your marketing. Take stock of what’s working and what’s not. Then, see if you can refresh your content to use some of the persuasive selling techniques I shared here. 

And, for more actionable B2B lead generation tips, be sure to subscribe to the B2B Lead Gen Podcast.

In B2B marketing, one of the biggest challenges is scaling lead quantity without compromising lead quality. 

In the B2B growth marketing world, marketers of niche products and services don’t have other demand that DTC e-commerce marketers do.

This is why the golden rule of niche marketing strategy is to market early and often. 

The idea is to build awareness through B2B content marketing before the customer shops. But what happens all too often, is marketing hands the lead over to sales before it’s qualified, and the prospect bounces.

“We all want a seamless customer experience. Yet our companies are full of interdepartmental seams. If you want to know how to improve the customer experience, stop handing leads off from one department to another,” says Roderick Jefferson when he answered the question, “what is sales enablement?” in a previous interview.

So deciding when, why, and how to move a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) to a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) is tricky business. If you’re a sales development rep, you must take the time to double-confirm that they’re qualified and ready to hear from a salesperson.

To solve for not just more but better, leads, I sat down with Greg Reeder, Director of Marketing at SAP National Security Services. Working in a niche market -- the US government sector -- he had plenty of intelligent insights on improving the B2B lead qualification process. And his insights are transferrable to any sector. 

3 ways to improve your lead qualification methods

At its core, lead gen is all about understanding your customer. The better you are able to do that, the less time you’ll spend having the wrong conversations -- or missing out altogether on the ones you should be having.

For B2B marketers in a finite market, taking a few extra steps to build a reliable lead qualification process is the easiest way to increase conversion rates. 

If you want to learn how to generate leads, here’s the most important thing I can tell you:

Leads x Conversion Rate = Revenue

Nothing directly impacts the bottom line more than the number of leads you generate and the percentage of them that you close.

1. Audit your current lead gen process 

Take a look at your current leads. Are they:

A real person with the correct contact info so your sales team can quickly get in touch? To enrich lead data, check out services like ClearBit, Datanyze, and LeadGenius to help round out customer records and fill in missing data fields.

Are you genuinely interested in what you have to offer? If there’s no interest, and you qualify the lead to be contacted by your SDRs or salespeople, your team will lose confidence in lead quality across the board.

Experiencing a problem or challenge your company can solve? In smaller B2B markets, you can use problem-solution-oriented content marketing campaigns to build visibility and credibility.

If you can confidently check all these boxes, your leads are qualified. If you can’t, your lead qualification tools and techniques are not effectively optimized.

Your team must be able to answer all of the leads’ questions. To do this, you may need to...

2. Work on your sales scripts

...and ask better questions!

Your team needs to intimately understand the customers’ needs and challenges and be well-versed on how the different benefits and features of your product or service can solve those. 

To have meaningful conversations with your potential customers, empathize with their pain points. Use the sales script as talking points. 

Teach your SDRs how to be true problem solvers, offering your potential customers a positive experience with deep subject matter expertise, broader industry trends, and personalized anecdotes.

Have your SDRs specialize in different vertical industry sectors so they deliver value to prospects even if they’re not ready to buy.

3. Appeal to their emotions 

Buyers decide on emotion and rationalize their decision with the facts. Yes, even when it comes to content marketing. 

You need to connect emotionally to convince your customers that they should buy your product or service.  

Your sales team and marketing team should both be qualifying leads. But effective sales communication is KEY. 

To develop your SDRs’ communication skills quicker, check out conversation intelligence platforms like Chorus and Gong, which transcribe and analyze sales calls in real time. This allows winning sales tactics to be effectively shared throughout the organization. Don't forget to subscribe for more tips and tricks to improve your B2B marketing.

If you were to ask a room of digital marketing agency and SEO consultants, “What’s the best plan for creating content for startups?” the overwhelming majority of them would swear by Brian Dean's skyscraper content marketing strategy.

I’ll give you a hard and fast definition of the skyscraper technique in this article. Still, from a big-picture standpoint, it’s essentially about overwhelming the reader with an encyclopedia-style article that covers everything related to a search term.

It’s a significant time commitment because you have to check what’s currently ranking and outdo it. And, given the time constraints startups are under, most of them take one look and give up before they even get started.

But what if there was an alternative to earning your search ranking without having to produce giant guides? What if, instead of beating the top posts by word count, content agencies took a more Spartan approach and won with simplicity and elegance instead?

https://youtu.be/qjI7dEcF2mI

If we are taking a customer-first approach and making the searcher’s experience the top priority, then serving up dense copy blocks that provoke a TLDR (too long didn’t read) response often doesn’t align.

And why would Google simply default to rewarding the longest post, when a shorter, more succinct post may give the reader exactly what they’re looking for, in less time?

This idea of matching the intent of the query (ie: how it can best serve the person who typed the phrase into Google) is the topic of this article, podcast, and corresponding video. 

I’m not suggesting SEO, organic content marketing and the skyscraper technique aren’t still effective approaches to content for startups. 

But, as you’ll discover after this summary of my talk with Nigel Stevens, Founder of Organic Growth Marketing, they’re no longer the only viable way to secure a top ranking in the modern world of B2B marketing. 

Why SEO and organic content are important

SEO and content are two sides of the same coin. 

Search engine optimization helps your business get found in a Google search.

And content is the vehicle you use to differentiate yourself and be seen by the Google algorithm. Without content, there’s nothing for Google to index and return to searchers.

“When you look up anything in Google (the results below the paid part…), my job is to propel companies to the top of those listings for the type of queries that align to their customer’s journey,” explained Nigel.  

SEO can also be broken into two categories:

Foundational: If someone is looking for you, can they find you?This is really about brand search. If I’m doing business with you already, or trying to check you out online, will you show up when I search your brand name and services? 

Going a little deeper, do you have a knowledge graph Panel? Can I see your tweets? What about links to your social media profiles? All these things reinforce the level of expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness people have when they evaluate you.

Growth: This involves creative content to connect with customers across multiple touchpoints. 

Growth-based SEO is all about those “know, like, and trust” factors of marketing. Repetition and visibility helps people get to know you, then they become familiar, and begin to like you. And, over time, they will start to trust the thing, person, or brand that has become so familiar.

You could say that repetition and visibility are what drives sales in B2B content marketing.

“When you go to the store, you don’t even remember seeing an ad for Windex but you're familiar with it, so you pick it as opposed to other ones,” said Nigel.

It’s the same in SEO for enterprise-level brands or start-ups. For every one of your products and offerings and services, you want to be found to maximize customer touch points.

But, even if you’re the biggest name in your field and already ranking for your overall brand name and services, it’s possible there are numerous touchpoints in the customer journey where you aren’t showing up.

In this example, you may not need SEO to make money, but you could be losing a subset of potential customers in the undecided phase. These people are reading reviews, comparing similar solutions, researching competitors, and watching thought-leader YouTube channels.

The cost of creating pages that cater to these searches and forming relationships with people linking back to your company is negligible and can pay dividends.

What is the skyscraper technique, and is it dead? 

The skyscraper technique was first created by Brian Dean of Backlinko. 

It’s all about creating “(back)link-worthy content” by creating comprehensive content.

The idea is to find high-ranking content and rewrite something better - often longer, fresher, and more comprehensive - on the subject. 

You then take it a step further by asking the people who linked to the original piece to also share and link to yours. If/when you win that organic ranking and become a higher “skyscraper” on the Google search page, earning more links is just a snowball effect. 

And, when you take a look at your analytics, you’ll see the skyscraper technique visualized in the form of your backlink number skyrocketing.

So, yes, the strategy can work when you’re strictly talking about organic content and rankings.

But, as I pointed out, writing a 30,000 word article doesn’t mean you will have good customer conversion. Google no longer needs to rank content based solely on word count. There are now an infinite number of metrics and consumer actions Google’s AI can look at to determine if a piece of content is fulfilling the needs of the searcher.

How long should your web page content be? 

If you can fulfill search intent with LESS, then as far as Google is concerned, that’s a better result. 

Some of the things Google might be looking at to determine this are bounce rate, time on page, number of pages they visit on your website after they land there, and if they continue searching even after they’ve clicked on your result.

Let’s look at that last example. 

If customers aren’t searching for other content after they visit yours, they are likely finding what they came for. And you don’t need to write more than your competitors. Conversely, if they are quickly bouncing, you’re not going to hold your rank.

A good content strategy for start-ups should begin with making sure your pages are optimized for queries people are most likely to search for and making sure your site structure helps people find what they are looking for. You need clear CTAs for them to follow and a plan for moving them through the customer journey from the first moment they find you.

Keeping this, and the fact that we all have shorter attention spans than ever before, it’s better to break your content out onto multiple pages than offer up one super-long guide.

“I’m probably more likely to watch five 2 minute clips than I am to watch one 10 minute clip,” said Nigel. And I agree.

Well-planned interlinking will ensure all your content is connected while also keeping readers engaged on your site. 

4 ways to effectively apply these content marketing strategies

When it comes to creating great content for start-ups, there is a list of steps you should take - in a particular order. 

1. Build a name

First, is visibility and authority. 

You can (and should) raise money, use both earned and paid media, and work hard on a backlink strategy to have reputable sources talking about you. 

Help those sites link to the proper pages when mentioning you, and you’ll begin to build credibility in the eyes of both customers and Google. For example, if a company like TechCrunch announced you as the latest newcomer to X industry, Google is now getting signals about what services you offer.

2. Turn owned into earned

The skyscraper technique of creating link-worthy content can help here.

“When you look at a time like COVID when there was all this uncertainty and people wanted data, you create this asset which is owned and people can find. But then, you can also get other people to comment on it, and even get some PR around it. At that point it becomes earned,” explained Nigel.

The takeaway here is to create organic content that serves as a conversation starter. You want to get talked about and covered.

You can do that through digital public relations techniques like guest posting on high profile blogs or hiring a PR agency.

As people find it and other publications quote it, your content will gain a longer lifespan and will turn into an earned asset as well. 

3. Use the right keywords

As a start-up, it’s best to take a gradual approach with your keyword research. Create a keyword strategy that builds upon itself by starting with very specific (ie: low search volume) keywords and moving into more general terms as you build up the organic content on your site. 

Look for terms as close to the products or services you are offering as possible. 

A good SEO consultant and keyword research tools like SEMRush or Keywords Everywhere can help you find these phrases and will give you some monthly search volume numbers.

Just know that estimated monthly search volume isn’t always indicative of the traffic you can actually achieve.

“I see keywords that supposedly get 0 searches a month, getting 10, 20 , 50, 100+ impressions...something that says it has 50 searches a month could end up actually being hundreds of visits,” said Nigel. 

But, even if you only do pull in 50 new visitors, you will know they are qualified leads. 

4. Think of every touchpoint in the customer journey

So, we’ve covered two approaches to creating content for start-ups: multiple shorter pieces that answer specific queries, or the skyscraper technique, which aims to cover everything in one long guide.

Neither is wrong. Neither is right.

What is sales enablement? Ask 10 people and get 12 different answers.

In short, great sales enablement should help break down barriers within your organization, allowing sales and marketing to align against shared KPIs.

In theory, that sounds great, but in practice, it doesn’t always happen. At least not as smoothly as we’d like. 

To get some insights into what successful sales enablement does - and doesn’t - look like in business, I spoke to Roderick Jefferson, CEO of Roderick Jefferson & Associate, a global sales enablement consulting firm.

You can listen to our discussion at the top of this post. But here’s what I learned from our discussion.

What is sales enablement, and how does it help your company? 

To define sales enablement, you must first understand what it is NOT.

A sales enablement team is not the IT department. But they don’t report to the sales department, either. 

Sales enablement teams work for the customer and with sales to ensure that the voice of the customer is heard.

Think of it like this: in order to make a beautiful piece of music, an orchestra needs a conductor. 

Sales enablement is like the conductor of your company. 

They talk to marketing, HR, sales -- anyone who controls a touchpoint in the customer journey -- and make sure everyone is on the same page so they come together in harmony. 

So what does it look like when the instruments are out of synch?

The most common scenario is when your marketing team is bringing in lots of leads, but your sales team can’t close them.

There is a disconnect. 

More likely than not, that disconnect is happening because the individual teams at your organization aren’t aligned on the KPIs.

Marketing is measuring leads in, while sales is measuring deals done. Both need to be focused on the same metrics. That’s called alignment.

This is a common problem that sales enablement teams can help solve by uniting teams against common goals.

3 ways sales and marketing teams can put the customer first

When engaging potential customers, we normally focus on three things: key differentiation, competitive advantage, and business value. 

Companies are usually great at the first two.

But customers really only care about the last one: business value. 

In order to (re)connect with your customer, your sales enablement people work to inspire your sales and marketing teams to remember these three things: 

Be genuinely curious - During the discovering qualification phase, you are laying the foundation for your relationship with the customer. Make that foundation rock solid.

Understand what is important to the individual - You can help move your customer’s career forward. Understand your impact on the person you are speaking to, not just their business. And use deep empathy to show them you understand their problems.

Articulate how you will help them - You must help your customer do one of two things - increase productivity or decrease pain. At the end of the day, it all boils down to one of these two things.

Conclusion

It’s time for your sales and marketing teams to align on goals and focus on how they can help the customer. 

For those engaged in complex sales with extended sales cycles, examine the B2B customer journey.

Map out the areas where folks drop out of the funnel. How can you decrease their pain and/or increase their efficiency? 

Focus on how you can make your customer and their business more successful. 

Then, create a streamlined process between all the teams in your company - HR, sales, marketing, etc. - to make sure the entire buyer journey is seamless, frictionless, and has your future customer at its core.

We all want a seamless customer experience. Yet our companies are full of interdepartmental seams. If you want to know how to improve the customer experience, stop handing leads off from one department to another.

To dig into these ideas a bit more, give this full podcast a listen. And don’t forget to subscribe to this podcast for more B2B marketing insights from industry leaders.

The best B2B content marketing agencies don't embark on a journey without a map, so why would anyone invest in B2B marketing without an audience analysis roadmap?

The reason so many fall short when it comes to data-driven marketing is they lack direction. And social media engagement, website usage, email marketing data are the digital breadcrumbs you use to find your way.

In B2B customer journey mapping, your first order of business is making sure you’re accurately tracking how people consume your data. If you’re using a service like Shopify, that means you need to track sessions across subdomains in the same account to measure the path visitors take between your website and your Shopify subdomain as one session.

It also means you should be using Google Tag Manager to run Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Hotjar in your domain and subdomain. That way, you can track the path to purchase, regardless of how it transpires.

If you want to ensure you’re getting the absolute most out of the data you are collecting, you’re in the right place. 

Thanks to my friend John Wall, a partner at Trust Insights, I will break down what data-driven marketing is, how machine learning may or may not influence the path to purchase, and how you can use data to create a B2B customer journey that drives sales. 

Or you can listen to my interview at the top of this post and hear it from him.

Me and John Wall podcasting at a marketing conference in Palo Alto.

A quick lesson on data-driven marketing

What is data-driven marketing? Data-driven marketing is a method that uses data from customer interactions to:

Enhance the customer experience, which basically means making it easier for people to get what they need from your website. Online, ease-of-use drives adoption.

Optimize marketing performance, which is focusing on how quick your site loads on desktop and mobile. Google penalizes sites that load slowly, so it’s important to make sure that’s not getting in your way.

And increasing revenue, which is about targeting the right customer, in the right place, at the right time. This is sometimes called a target audience, which is a kind of tacky expression, since it plays off a hunting metaphor. SimilarWeb and Talkwalker are tools you can use to find customer-rich environments.

“Data can show which programs are the most successful...and what terms are trending at what times so that you can time your content and your advertising to take advantage of it,” says John Wall.

It is worth noting, though, that the amount of data you have at your disposal can vary. 

With small B2B companies, you may not have enough content creative or traffic to collect a lot of data. Larger scale companies and most B2C brands are using machine learning to find insights, but that requires a big enough data set to be statistically relevant. Small companies can accelerate the acquisition of user data by buying traffic through paid media.

And we’re only just beginning to integrate data from the internet of things, which are devices with GPS tracking that are tethered to the web.

In his best-selling book AI Superpowers, former Google China President Kai Fu-Lee writes, “Smart Finance’s deep learning algorithms don't just work too obvious metrics, like how much money is in your WeChat wallet. Instead, it derives predictive power from data points that would seem irrelevant to a human loan officer. For instance, it considers the speed at which you typed your date of birth, how much battery power is left on your phone, and thousands of other parameters.”

As the amount of data points we have to work with grows exponentially, charting the B2B customer journey manually is no longer feasible.

“It would take a human months or years to dig through data that a good model can churn through in 20 minutes.” 

Once you consider the data and chart your course, it becomes data-driven marketing when you leverage those insights to increase the number of prospective customers you connect with, build relationships with and qualify as a sales accepted lead. 

And data-driven marketing doesn’t end after you’ve handed off the lead to sales. Nor does it end after you’ve finished one campaign. 

The B2B customer journey is a continuum. 

Improving the customer experience to drive product utilization and retention through customer success programs are part of that loop.

The idea is to circumvent churn and generate recurring revenue.

Give the process plenty of time

Take a lesson from American folk hero John Henry. He tried to beat a steam-powered rock drill with his bare hands -- and died doing it.  

The lesson: embrace, don’t resist, new advancements (or data) -- lest it hinder your company’s growth. 

And remember that the process of data collection is cumulative. So focus on long term goals. 

This is how you’ll be able to slowly optimize all of your marketing funnel stages.

How to use data for a more effective B2B buyer journey

If you’re looking for a digital marketing transformation, you need a way of tracking each person as they move through the marketing funnel. The need to be able to see where they enter your site and the path they take to optimize the path to purchase.

You use analytics platforms like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Hotjar and Screaming Frog to capture the data and a CRM or customer data platform to collect all those touchpoints on customer records.

If you want more on which option is right for you, read my Beginner’s Guide to Vertically Integrated vs. Best-of-Breed Software.

4 Steps to Mapping the B2B Customer Journey

Look at the customer’s path

“Where they are coming from, how long it takes them to get there, and how much you had to spend to get them along that pipeline,” are the key measures you should be monitoring, says John. 

Where they come from could be search, social, referral, email, or unknown. You can’t double down on what’s working or pivot from what’s not if you don’t have that data.

Make sure your data is clean 

Ensure the data is accurate by checking your statistics against the actual customer journey, and the actual customer journey against you data. Different analytics packages may report different  results so look for similarities in how your data trends. If one of your data sets is deviating significantly, check it out and make sure the data is accurate. And make sure you’re interpreting the data accurately too.

“Was that an unsubscribe or a click through?” asks John. If you’re recording unsubscribes as click throughs, that’s data-misgiven.

Or if you’re tracking email responses to measure the effectiveness of an email marketing campaign, are you discounting for autoresponders?

Make problem-solution oriented content

If your B2B marketing doesn't answer your prospective customer’s problems, you might still have an engaging website, but it’s not going to get found by leads who enter your sales funnel. 

The idea is to use the data to attract the right people, and once they get there, to optimize the path to purchase. So lead magnets to convert visitors into discovery calls, product demo and pricing requests. 

Don’t fail to phone or email. Let them complete their mission on your site without having to leave your site. Ease-of-use drives conversions too. 

Anticipate your visitor’s needs. 

Digital marketing is kind of like housekeeping’s turn-down service at 5 star hotels. It’s just on your website instead. 

So fold down and place a virtual chocolate mint on the bed sheet. 

On your website, that translates into a solid content marketing strategy.

Don’t waste good money on bad efforts

One of the very first things you should be doing is using data to see what isn’t working - and stop spending money on it. 

When people come to your site from social media, how long do they stay? How many pages do they visit? What percentage joins your email list, books a call or makes a purchase? How does social traffic compare to organic search traffic?

And how much time are you investing in social vs organic search optimization, referral traffic and email marketing?

See which traffic converts best on a percentage basis and reallocate your digital marketing resources accordingly.

Conclusion

Don’t just collect multiple data points for the sake of having data. Without analytics, big data is just noise.  So map out your customer journey to increase leads.

Follow the steps in this article to avoid the pitfalls and effectively optimize the path to purchase against hard data.

If you’re still feeling unsure about how to approach data-driven marketing, let’s talk. 

These are types of conversations I like to have most with B2Bs, because they lead to a-ha moments, which are always fun to behold.

If you’re marketing to various online audiences, you’ve probably heard the term GDPR by now.

But what is GDPR? 

What’s CCPA? 

And how do they impact you and your digital marketing team?

Digital compliance is something that often gets overlooked. But it shouldn’t.

Fines and penalties, while rare, could put you out of business if regulators decide to make an example out of you.

To help you understand your GDPR and CCPA compliance requirements, I got together with Robert Freund, an experienced advertising attorney. 

It’s his job to help you avoid business mishaps. And he shared some helpful insights about which data privacy laws apply to you, how to update your marketing, and when this all went into effect.

What is GDPR? 

The EU created GDPR to protect consumer privacy rights. 

It is intended to help consumers understand:

What personal information businesses are collecting

How their information is used

How to opt out of data collection

If you have your website, to be compliant, you may need to update your privacy policy. And if you have a separate social media policy, you may need to update that too.

“It’s about updating your privacy policy...putting information about how you are using data and what you are collecting in front of the consumer,” said Robert.

This includes creating a cookie pop-up to let consumers opt out of data collection if they choose.  Google ended cookie support recently.

But, why does this matter to US companies? 

If you are a US business with EU customers -- or it’s even remotely possible that someone from Europe may find their way to your website -- you should follow GDPR rules regarding data privacy and disclosure.

“Even if you aren’t physically in Europe, the way the rule is written still applies to you,” said Robert. 

What is CCPA?

The California Consumer Privacy Act is California’s version of the GDPR, enacted on January 1st, 2020. 

You will be subject to the CCPA if you collect data from California residents and:

Exceed $25 million in gross annual revenue...

OR

...obtain personal information from 50,000 or more California residents per year...

OR 

...50% or more of your annual revenue comes from selling the personal information of California residents. 

“If you’re a small business not located in California, you still have to figure out if California residents are visiting your website,” Robert clarified.

If so, you are subject to the law and should do everything you can to meet CCPA compliance requirements.

Complying with CCPA Privacy Laws

Remember, you should consult a professional attorney in your jurisdiction to ensure you are doing the following things correctly. This is not legal advice. But getting compliant may include these steps:

Updating your privacy policy

Updating your website policy

Auditing what data you are collecting (and how)

Having a plan in case of a data breach

Giving consumers a very clear opt-out option

Having disclosure guidelines in your social media agreements

“If somebody connected or employed by your brand is going to be talking about it online, you have to make that kind of disclosure, and it’s just good policy to ensure that everyone does that all the time,” said Robert.

The grace period for meeting CCPA compliance requirements ended in July 2020. So if you’re making more than $25M annual, you’ve got work to do.It’s time to review and revise your website’s privacy policy. 

Compliance is a moving target. My client, Poster Compliance Center, sells workplace compliance posters that employers legally must display.

One of their offerings is an annual subscription, which ensures you’ll always have the most current posters to display.

That’s how frequently city, state, and federal rules and regs change. You need to subscribe to a compliance poster provider to stay current. GDPR and CCPA are two of the latest regulations to come into effect. And they’re both consumer privacy regulations, developed partly in response to the Cambridge Analytica fiasco. 

Or contact me if you need help navigating CCPA compliance requirements or connecting with a reasonable attorney who understands digital media compliance.

For more important news and updates, subscribe to the B2B Lead Gen Podcast, where we share helpful digital marketing insights and effective tactics from industry experts.

Are you losing potential customers because of a bad user experience?You can have an amazing product and the best website marketing company, but lose sales if the user experience is poor. 

To help you know how to improve the customer experience on your site, I interviewed an expert on the matter, Darren Krape, Senior UX Designer at Amazon.

I met Darren when I led a seminar on Digital Diplomacy at the Dept. of State, and he was a guest speaker. He had played a critical role in assisting the US Embassy in Cairo with digital communications and is an expert on social media and the Arab Spring.

Darren Krape presenting to senior Foreign Service Officers in my 2-Day Digital Diplomacy Seminar at the Foreign Service Institute just outside DC.

But now, he works on user experience design at Amazon. 

In a world where there’s no data like more data, Amazon is an e-commerce gold standard, having optimized their user experience against terabytes of data about how people use their site.

Photo by Jerry Wang on Unsplash

At Amazon, the CX team certainly knows that, to pull in more sales, you need good marketing, a rock-solid user interface, and ease-of-use.

As you dig more into your conversion funnel, it becomes clear that UX is the customer journey. It is where branding, design, usability, and function come together or collide.

So, before you launch a product, test different versions of the same page and see which one converts better. Swap out calls to action text, button colors, images, and headlines. 

“If you have a user test with 5 or 6 people, and 3 of them struggle with it, it’s pretty clear evidence that that particular thing needs to be fixed,” said Darren.

Narrow down what is or is not an issue. It's as important for Amazon as it for those building a B2B customer journey. 

There are many reasons people will choose one product over another. But if your potential customers are consistently going to the competition, it may be time to learn how to improve the customer experience by decreasing any friction in the buyer journey.

How to improve your customer experience

Creating the least amount of friction as possible at each stage of the marketing funnel is the secret to a seamless customer journey. It’s about breaking the process down into a bunch of micro conversions.

“For example, the less information you collect during the sign-on or purchase process, the better. Any additional bit of information is additional friction to the user,” Darren pointed out.

When trying to get sign-ups, make it easy. All they really need is an email address.

If you’re offering a free demo or trial, don’t ask for credit card information upfront. Nothing kills a freemium model quicker than requiring a credit card to sign up. You don’t need a credit card to try Zoom or Slack. B2B growth marketing is about getting customer trials. 

“The incredible power of free is a valuable tool for distribution and virality,” writes Reid Hoffman in his book Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies.

Once they’re in your system, you can nurture them through email cadences and work to onboard them. 

In the early stages of Amazon, one friction point was shipping times. 

“I don’t want to have to wait 7 days for my thing when I can just go down to the local store and get it in 20 minutes,” said Darren.

After they realized it was an essential purchase factor, Amazon reduced their shipping time to the now-famous two-day and single-day shipping we all know and love.

If you can transform a friction point into a selling point, that’s a digital marketing transformation.

In CX, Friction is the Enemy 

And, when in doubt, verify by asking your customer!

Because what you think could be a friction point may not even be on their mind.

Don’t be afraid to reach out to your customers and learn firsthand how to improve your customer experience. 

This is such an essential step of successful marketing that one of the first things I do when working with a brand is analyze the data.

Too many digital marketing consultants go to social media before they’ve examined the data. Until you can distinguish between what’s working for you and what’s not, why would you pick a media channel to optimize?

I take an owned media-first approach and optimize all these factors before advancing to shared media.

The goal is to discover and iron out the friction points, creating a digital marketing plan that helps get them closer to their sales objectives. And it’s about optimizing the path to purchase before you focus on driving traffic, so you’re in a position to covert awareness into consideration, evaluation, and transactions.

B2B lead generation can feel like a difficult code to unlock. 

Fortunately, you’re about to get some ideas on how to generate qualified leads with your B2B content marketing efforts. Here are just a few of the insights I got about B2B growth marketing during a recent chat with David Cardiel, Head of Growth at Cision.

What is lead generation?

David Cardiel

In short, content marketing is how you attract and convert customers who have shown interest in your service. 

Lead generation is not about buying email lists and spamming people, although a lot of people think it is.

And it used to be about how well you leveraged paid media to generate interest in your products or services. But technology has really changed the process today. 

Today, we’re all about AI and data.

“We can tell you exactly what they’re doing on your website and can help increase the quality and the volume. We can help influence what you want people to be doing there.” 

5 solutions for lead qualification and successful B2B marketing

There are more gems in the interview, but these are the tips that really resonated with me. If you’re looking to simplify your lead qualification process, start here:

1. Categorize your leads

This doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be as easy as:

Tier 1: Qualified leads: These people are shopping on the website and asking for demos.

Tier 2: Everyone else: People that come in from events, webinars, chats, etc. 

2. Take weight off the sales team

Set your sales team up for success by creating a team of marketing reps who know how to generate leads for B2B companies and who can qualify those inbound leads.

Set up a 5-minute Service Level Agreement (SLA) for outreach with a scoring model that helps the team see who has the highest propensity to convert.

3. Personalize your marketing

“How are we going to speak the language of nonprofits, high-tech...travel and tourism?” David asks. 

You can do it, but you probably shouldn’t try to cover all the bases at the same time. 

Structure your one-to-many campaign down to a one-to-few or one-to-one approach. Take the time to create a different tactic for each sector and you’ll find yourself generating more - and more qualified leads.

4. Timing is everything

Know the seasonality of things. B2B brands probably have a longer runway, but, in retail, there is a small window for marketing: 

“We know we’ve got to kick off our retail campaigning in late May/early June…really after September, you’re not gonna get a hold of them. They’re too busy in the retail industry.”

It’s important to time your marketing based on the busy seasons for each sector. 

5. Monitor your social media 

Look at who is sharing or re-tweeting your content. 

“Are they coming back to your site through the links that you put out there? Can you track them appropriately?” 

They should be treated like a potential buyer. Make sure you have a system in place to tag, monitor and segment this activity. 

Wrapping up my thoughts on how to generate leads

With a dedicated marketing rep team, you can gather information on qualified leads to take your business to the next level. 

Make sure you are personalizing your outreach to best suit the season, region, and interests of your specific customer for the most marketing impact.