Let’s explore how sales and marketing funnels may be best optimized:

1. The Importance of Understanding Your Customers

Successful marketers know what and when their customers want and the most effective way of making their services available. While most businesses like to believe that they are customer-centric, few agree with this self-assessment. Bridging this gap in understanding between their business and their customers has proven evidently more challenging in 2021 following the pandemic

2. Changing Mindsets

Although the disruption caused by the COVID-19 still consumes many countries, we’re beginning to see some emerging trends in customers’ behavior across the globe. People are increasingly shifting to digital platforms to cater to their daily needs. Therefore, marketers need to adapt accordingly and ensure a better user experience.

3. Re-Evaluate Your Existing Content

The rise of working from home is definitely offering more opportunities for consumers to consume more content. This means that it’s worth revising your online presence to accommodate a new consumer mindset in the industry. And now’s an ideal time to alter your layouts and landing pages to suit your new consumers better.

4. Ramp Up Your Remarketing

It’s observed that around 75% of online shoppers leave your website without making a purchase. With pandemic generating an increased volume of online browsing, now is an ideal time to remarket to your website abandoners alongside previous page visitors to get them back to your site. Alongside website visitors, you can also generate new leads and sales by testing your levels of engagement with a custom audience, allowing you to target users who have engaged actively with your content.

Wrapping Up

What really matters is how relevant you are. The more relevant you are, the better levels of engagement and, subsequently, better returns. Also, it’s worth segmenting your audience to ensure the best results. The pandemic may be a disruptive event that caused chaos for a wide range of industries worldwide. Still, with shifting consumer mindsets comes a fresh opportunity for marketers to generate new conversions and revise their approach to retention. This brave new market is likely to present more businesses with the chance to win more customers and work towards creating more value-based, insightful content to educate and satisfy consumers with an increasing level of consciousness. 

The post Lead Gen Strategy in The Post-Pandemic B2B Space appeared first on XDBS Worldwide.

Providing the right information to the right people at the right time to fit your ideal customer’s needs is demand generation.

4 Demand Generation Strategies

Let’s discuss 4 demand generation strategies you can start using right now.

1) Use the Lookalike Audiences On Facebook

The custom audiences that closely resemble the users that have already expressed interest in your services or content based on demographic and behavioral affinity are called lookalike audiences. Creating and uploading custom audiences using data you’ve already gathered from your actual users is allowed by Facebook, and it also helps create audiences that share similar characteristics.

One of the main advantages of leveraging the vast wealth of data that Facebook has on its users is that the companies can double their Facebook advertising campaigns’ potential reach. The larger the custom audience the company uploads, the more extensively they can cast their nets using lookalikes. Considering the time people spend on Facebook, this targeting aspect is one of the most robust demand generation strategies.

2) Webinars are Good to Partner with Industry Superstars

Webinars are an effective way to connect with prospects across all stages of the buying journey. Their production is relatively easy and doesn’t have much of an overhead cost. Webinars have proven to be extremely successful for the top-of-the-funnel engagement and the rest of the marketing funnel from mid to bottom and closed — effectively. In the times of the pandemic, webinars have stood out as an effective digital approach.

More businesses need to warm up to webinars and incorporate them as part of their demand generation strategy. They should be looking to partner with the superstars of their industry on webinars. It increases the company’s reach in the industry, cultivate valuable connections with significant influencers, and encourage brand awareness – all vital elements of a current demand generation strategy.

Collaborating with industry rock stars isn’t as easy as asking them to join its next webinar. Founding relationships require time and effort, and it’s not that easy to approach the speakers you want. But when the company plans and starts producing webinars, they should attempt to feature well-known and knowledgeable guests. It will help them offer the best advice, tips, and strategies during the webinars.

3) Use Managed Placements in Display Campaigns

Many advertisers tend to overlook the power of managed placements in their display network campaigns. With the help of managed placements, advertisers can control who views their display ads. It works more effectively as they can specify where their ads appear; they can also limit their reach to accounts that are more likely to respond positively to them. Instead of adopting a scattershot approach of regular display ads, think of them as a more targeted display method.

Display campaigns are widely used to promote brand awareness, and the display turns out to be a highly significant part of a broader demand generation campaign. It helps to promote the brand and increase the mindshare, both critical aspects of display campaigns. With managed placements, the companies benefit with additional control over who sees their ads, making this ad type extra effective.

4) Consider Implementing a Lead Scoring System

Demand generation is about raising the quality of those leads instead of just growing the brand’s number of leads. Lead scoring is one of the finest techniques to determine if the leads are of quality, which would eventually help the sales team close more deals.

The prospects’ historical behavior is evaluated through lead scoring and their actions while interacting with the brand to regulate whether the individual prospects demonstrate sufficient interest to be considered a “hot” lead for the company’s sales team. It is mastered by observing the actions taken at several touchpoints with the brand, including their views on a specific page. This suggests their purchase intent- and their interest in demonstrating the company’s product or if they’ve used some free tools or the stage at which the prospect happens to be in the funnel. Lead scoring can gauge how valuable the lead is by measuring the individual’s role in an organization, what part they play in decision-making, seniority in the company, and responsibility.

Final Thoughts

Marketing has changed- and every marketer today knows that the purchase of advertising in the press or the purchasing a potential list of clients is insufficient to run a business effectively. In today’s day and age, one has to reach clients through different sales channels such as search engines, social media, websites, events, and many others. With the help of creating a well-thought-out lead generation strategy that allows qualified leads to be solicited, the significant development of conducted business activities becomes possible. The uniqueness of demand generation is in the diversity and multichannel nature of the possibilities created by strategy. Demand generation is an essential step towards optimizing your marketing funnel and increasing your lead generation efforts. It is your go-to-market strategy that represents your assumption for what the market wants. From there on, demand generation represents your first experiment to support or refute your hypothesis. Once you form inference on your first assumption, you make another one and continue to test.

The post Building a Better Global Demand Generation Strategy appeared first on XDBS Worldwide.

And lead generation describes the actual means of stimulating and capturing involvement in a product or service when considering developing product sales pipeline. The rise of platforms and the social media websites like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, pose a plethora of opportunities for businesses to exploit this facet of digitally mediated relationships, for instance, spreading awareness about your business and engaging with your prospective customers.

Lead generation through social media channels is simple, fast, and useful. According to a report by Quick Sprout, social media’s ‘lead to close’ chances are higher by 100 % when compared to outbound marketing. Twitter accounts for 82 % of all social leads, while 40 % of marketing professionals believe that Facebook is a crucial part of business marketing. The goal of lead generation is to leverage the available information about customers or potential employees and use it to identify similar prospects based on specific predefined attributes that best define a prospect for the business.

Let’s look at some of the critical objectives of lead generation and how businesses can use it to their advantage:

• To increase brand awareness: According to Statista, “there will be 3.02 billion social media users worldwide by 2021”. With almost everyone on social media nowadays, and researching brands, products, and services, getting your target audience’s attention is easier and relatively effortless to create awareness about your brand.
• To boost web traffic: The social media sphere is home to more than 3.4 billion active users. Social media is an excellent source to drive traffic to your website. They bring in ample opportunities to gain business visitors and convert them into leads.
• To reach out to new prospects: The best way to build an engaged audience base on social media is by focusing on the people who already know you. By sharing relevant content, promptly interacting with them, and acknowledging their feedback will help you expand your audience base and fortify your existing relationships.

Ways of advertising on social media platforms for effective lead generation:

Social media advertising takes targeting at a higher level. Every platform allows you to target a specific set of audiences, based on the demographics and their interests. This way, you can also keep your marketing expenses low and only pay when you get a lead.

Facebook

Boasting the largest database of users than any other social network, Facebook is increasingly used to create promoted content using ‘Leads Ad.’ You can also include a CTA along the lines of ‘learn more’ or ‘sign up’ buttons similar to the gated content where potential customers submit their information in exchange for something useful and valuable to them. The fact that Facebook Ads automatically populates the lead form, including the user’s details such as their email address, etc. makes this feature very convenient. It eliminates the extra step such as re-directing the users to a landing page, and having them fill and submit their information with just one click –make sure you’re giving something valuable enough to get their info!

The most popular ways to generate leads with Facebook are:

• On-Page Promotions: Businesses can create their FB page. The people who like the page may be your potential leads.
• Off-Page Promotions: It’s promoting your lead generation content on Facebook communities, groups, and other pages.
• Paid Promotions: Businesses prefer paid promotions since it fetches them immediate results, and Facebook offers a range of social ads with a specific purpose as well.

Instagram

Instagram is an enormous platform and has around 800M monthly active users, so there’s an opportunity for online lead generation. However, what also needs to be considered is that the audience on Instagram is mostly under 30, so only use this platform if you’re targeting that demographic. With over 800-900 Million monthly active users on Instagram, it’s the most popular social platform to generate leads. Through your ads, you can reach the exact audience you want using their precise targeting options such as location, interests, behavior, automated targeting, etc.

• Direct Message With An Introduction: Since you need to start the conversation somehow, DMs are a great way to grab your prospect’s attention. You can also add comments in the public comments section with, “please check your DM!” Or write to them saying, “I have the solution to your problem. Can I send you a DM?” People appreciate and tend to respond well when you ask for their consent.
• Offer Them Some Value: The right way to start a long term relationship is to focus on how you can provide them value rather than thinking, “what can I get from them.”  Think on the lines of “how can you solve their problems” or  “how collaborating with you may benefit them in the long run?” is something that should be thought out well before you make that move.

LinkedIn

With around 700 million users, and more than 260 million monthly active users,  the most extensive business network out there is undoubtedly LinkedIn. It is increasingly used as a B2B online lead generation tool. LinkedIn is the most resourceful platform when it comes to B2B social media lead generation because the majority of users are looking to build and promote their business network. People are open and more than willing to discuss business opportunities and use LinkedIn to find new approaches, products, and solutions that will help their business grow. Of those LinkedIn users who engage with the platform monthly, almost 40% access it daily.

Key take-aways to capture leads on LinkedIn:

• Targeting a niche audience: With the broadest reach of around 675 million active professionals on LinkedIn, target your prospects based on job titles, functions, industries, etc.
• Creating effective ads: LinkedIn ads are perfect for acquiring leads, building brand awareness, and event registrations.
• Regulating your expenses: You can control your spending with easy and flexible pricing options. You can also start and stop your paid ads at any time.

Twitter

Twitter is a great and very resourceful way to connect with new prospects and audiences. Still, these visitors need persistent attention, and this can be done by ensuring that you have a proper lead nurturing process in place.  It will take them from being your Twitter followers to paying customers. Most Twitter users are typically in the early discovery stages and will need a lot of time and convincing before they convert. Focusing on maintaining contact, and providing them with additional education-rich content, will help nurture their trust in you, and will drive them closer to your desired business goal.

You can create campaigns based on objectives, such as receiving more website clicks and conversions. By selecting a campaign objective, you can drive traffic to your landing page and have the user take some action, such as downloading a brochure, filling out a form, or even buying one of your products.

Key take-aways to capture leads on Twitter

• Increase the Click-through rate by attaching images or pictures, inserting trending hashtags of popular industry topics, by providing a link to a valuable free resource or by giving a link near the beginning of the tweet to catch user’s attention.
• Plan and outline your campaign objective, such as raising awareness, attracting new followers, or re-directing traffic to your website.
• One of the exciting ways to get more attention on Twitter is to ask questions- People have an instinct to look for answers whenever they are confronted with a question. Post consistently and try engaging personally with your Twitter leads.
• You can also use Twitter’s Direct Message Cards- a useful lead to building leads.
• Select your daily budget for your ads. You can start with at least $30/day to reach audiences throughout the day consistently.

Conclusion

The focus is on the use of social media to identify relevant profiles or “leads” for business in sourcing new employees or collaborators.

For marketers who are ready to move beyond brand awareness and engagement, social media lead generation is the best next step. Gathering leads on social media will not only help you find people interested in your company but also, these leads will help you keep in touch with potential customers. When it comes to improving lead quality, most marketers agree that social media marketing is the way to go! When generating leads with social media, it’s essential to reach out to your targeted audience using these popular channels. The four most widely used platforms mentioned above are a jumping-off point, and more so for B2B companies. Your social media platforms can be your very own gold mine of sorts!

The post Social Media Lead Generation is Better Than Ever! appeared first on XDBS Worldwide.

Best Ways How Marketers Can Make Use Of Intent Data  

1. Mapping the Customer Journey

Intent data is valuable for digital marketing, and what many marketers may not realize is that intent begins before the buyer even docks on your website. It can be challenging for digital marketing teams to know how much aware the potential customers are when they first visit a brand’s site, but this can dramatically impact decision-making. Therefore, intent signals and the customer journey can vary greatly. And that’s where personalization comes in. With a unified view on intent data and analytics, marketers can be proactive and predict and respond to the audience’s intent in a contextually relevant manner-despite where the customers are in their journey. And that’s why mapping intent data to specific points along the customer journey is crucial. Nowadays, businesses are applying AI and advanced analytical models to cultivate value-generating behaviors and prolong the customer’s lifetime value.

2. Hyper-Personalizing the Digital Experience

Intent data can be used by the digital marketers to trigger hyper-personalize the marketing campaigns. Someone visiting the same product or service detail page multiple times is a signal that they may be interested in that product or service offering. It’s handy to have a system in place that automatically triggers a cross-channel campaign that pushes for a conversion. But this is made possible only when you have detailed and accurate intent data.

3. Optimizing in Real-Time

When your customer is evaluating your brand, intent data, and precise analytics can help you adapt marketing efforts to the customer response in real-time. Today’s marketplace is dynamic and fast-paced, and marketing teams need to stay focused and agile to meet the rapidly evolving customer demands. With the help of intent data, marketing teams can automatically optimize the product or service offers, for instance, based on past behaviors or purchase decisions. High-quality intent data enables marketing teams to enhance and optimize their efforts in real-time.

4. Finding Out Patterns and Retaining Customers

Intent data and analytics help you find out patterns of user behavior and drive customer engagement in the post-purchase stages of the customer journey. The customer journey doesn’t end with making a purchase, and especially B2B, customer retention is critical for maximizing the ROI of their marketing efforts. Customer retention is imperative and should be the focus of every business owner because it’s way more economical and cost-effective to retain already existing customers than to find new ones. Consistent focus on existing customers can significantly boost your ROI.

Another important factor and a big trend in 2020 will be to understand the emotions of the customers during the decision-making process. The kind of questions that run in their minds are based on emotions, and not only on satisfaction or analytical thinking. Although the role of emotions in sales and marketing is not new, and until now, it had only been an opinion and not a fact. However, 2020 is has been a year where more B2B businesses understand that. As a result, they have been able to measure and analyze them to change the emotional data into a digital form, which is easier to comprehend and to use. A deeper and better understanding of the data about the customers’ decisions and the emotions that drive them to make those can give companies an edge and an advantage to grow and succeed.

Final Thoughts

The role of marketing is to gauge the intent. B2B marketers have done that for years by creating pipelines of content and scoring lead prospects on internally biased assumptions. Now, it should be done on the websites to enable a lot of preliminary desk research of prospects. People are looking for diversity in the content and validated thoughts and opinions. In B2B, where there are unusually long lead cycles and multiple decision-makers, it is highly unlikely that a prospect reads a piece of content on our site, and requests a demo that ever reaches an opportunity. The application of intent leads to more influential marketing, enabling contact earlier on in the buying cycle. It also allows more informed marketing—advertising, which can be scattered if improperly rolled out. If you know what people are looking for, it makes the process of advertising a lot easier. Intent data enables companies to overcome content deficit and saturation. Rather than having to produce a full portfolio of content, we can now create assets that help persuade and convert.

B2B businesses today cannot afford to ignore the customer intent data while developing their digital marketing strategies for 2020 and beyond. It’s essential to see the world as your customers view it as and then shape the customer journey accordingly with data and analytics. The rewards will be revenue and cost improvements and lasting competitive advantage over your peers.

The post Reasons Why B2B Sales and Marketing Teams Will Progress With Intent Data in 2020 appeared first on XDBS Worldwide.

Or

Why do people never click the CTA, email, or fill out that form on your website?

Well! The reasons could be many. They may be shopping around, researching a particular topic, or just casually browsing. The reason could be any, but the fact of the matter is that they’ve wandered now. And if you want to re-direct them back, retargeting you the opportunity to remarket yourself back again and make that second impression. The reason why remarketing proves to be useful is that more than half of the buying process is already over. So when a prospect reaches out to the sales rep, his mind is almost made upon if he wants to make that purchase or not. It’s believed that as compared to other marketing tactics, remarketing tends to convert nearly 50 % of web traffic. Converting the window shoppers into customers is what retargeting does!

With marketing having its 2 main objectives, i.e

1) Building awareness and recognition of your brand

2) Encouraging return visits and search inquiries

And if you think if it works for B2B, it most certainly does. And one of the most prominent reasons is because the purchase journey is more drawn out in B2B as compared to B2C. It is because decision-making in B2B is relatively more time consuming, and business decisions are not made lightly. Typically, there are multiple decision-makers involved, with approvals to get and considerable budgets to consider- in which case, retargeting is an excellent way for brands to stay afloat and remain in the front sight. At the same time, businesses take their time to reach a decision.

How to Get Most Out of Your B2B Retargeting Strategy

1) Get Your Divisioning and Segmenting Right

Just like lead scoring, you need to categorize your audience into segments on the basis of their behavior and sales-readiness. It helps determine what ads and other marketing collaterals they receive depending on where they are in the purchasing journey. It helps create a more personalized interaction with them. Segmenting enables you to categorize people who visited your website and what page they stayed on for how long. These statistics can be matched with the data in your CRM. It helps you know your audience and your purchasing journey well, and convert leads with retargeting.

2) Remarket Your Customers at Every Stage of B2B Sales Funnel

This helps you capture leads depending on the stage they’re in the sales funnel. Since the typical duration of a sales cycle for B2B businesses ranges from four to seven months, it is a considerably good enough time to keep your prospects engaged. Relying on search traffic has a possibility of converting to business to only about 2%, which means the significant chunk of prospects is lost somewhere in between awareness or consideration stage of your funnel.  Retargeting helps you connect with them again, and this time, it may play to your advantage because you know where they’re at and how you can engage them. You should approach your B2B retargeting journey by keeping in consideration the three-stage trinity through which you can remarket your customers:

• Lead Generation
• Lead Nurturing and
• Proposal

Once you’ve got these three in place, you can then get to work at a micro-level.

3) Create Exclusive Landing Pages Specific to the User Experience

• Good knowledge and understanding of your target audience depending on where they’re at in the sales funnel, you can start working on and devising what messages and content to offer them. A customized landing page designed to serve a specific customer is more likely to encourage call-to-action. Make sure the content they access is well thought of after careful segmenting, and each segment is relative to exclusive customer experience. Typically, a prospect reaches a landing page by searching a website, email newsletter, social, or a blog post. An offer that is relevant to them and interesting enough will encourage them to take steps to fill out a form on the landing page, which then converts them from a visitor to a lead. You should incorporate the following to make your landing page effective.

• A brief and compelling headline describing the offer

• Subheading giving away the offer albeit subtly

• An audio-visual representation talking about the offer

• A brief note that explains the benefits or the perks of the offer

• A CTA that fascinates the visitor to consider the offer

• A very brief form to complete the claiming offer

• Testimonials or reviews that may highlight the value of the offer

Designing exclusive landing pages can move a prospect towards conversion for sure.

Final Thoughts

With the number of competing businesses is withstanding today, we can’t stress enough about the advantages of retargeting in B2B and how and what relevant messaging can actually fetch us. All it takes is careful analysis and deliberation and a good understanding of your target audience and prospects. While retargeting is proved to be the most effective ways to re-engage with your leads, all you need to do is to maximize every opportunity there is until the conversion happens. With a little time and effort, you can have the most lucrative offer presented in the right way, at the right time and to the right people, and you’ll see the rewards flow in.

The post Unleashing the Power of Retargeting in B2B appeared first on XDBS Worldwide.

All these stats point to one crucial information, and that is if you’re still not using LinkedIn effectively, your business is possibly missing out on some potentially good leads. Although your company has a presence on this networking site, there’s still a lot more you could do to utilize LinkedIn to its full potential. Let’s discuss a few fundamental marketing trends on LinkedIn that can boost your marketing strategy.

1. Content Still Rules

In order for you to market and sell your product or services and how your organization stands to profit from it, LinkedIn is a great business platform.  Publishing useful and ground-breaking pieces of content on LinkedIn gives the potential decision-makers and leaders the associated material to comprehend your services through blogs, videos, or infographics.

2. Be Definitive

Today’s B2B marketing trends is all about identifying your target audience since building up a more targeted and focusing on it brings more qualified traffic – and with B2B organizations, quality always beats the quantity.

3. Assess What Matters

The majority of B2B marketers use metrics like CTR (Click-Through-Rate) or the number of views on videos to measure the performance for a particular campaign. However, when you look at the new B2B Marketing trends on LinkedIn, you should also examine other forms of assessment.

4. Never Underrate the Power of a Small Audience

LinkedIn allows B2B organizations to establish connections with clients and experts who can share information on what items, frameworks, and systems their companies use. Creating LinkedIn groups and getting connected with single contributors can also be another point of access, allowing you to pick up and use the inside information for your product for service directly from the business.

5. Be a Leader and a Hard Task-Master

Using LinkedIn’s built-in functionality to network by creating an image for your brand and gaining the trust of your audiences by sharing the business sector news on your profile, connecting with different organizations, and encouraging your clients to post compelling content on their own channel can get you visibility and high returns.

Conclusion

With the proliferation of content and advertising options and the ability to target the desired audience at every stage, the time invested in LinkedIn marketing is undoubtedly worth it. For you to leverage the advantage of using LinkedIn for your business, all you need is to stay up-to-date with LinkedIn’s most potent and effective trends.

The post Linkedin Marketing Trends in 2020 appeared first on XDBS Worldwide.

 51% of all website traffic still comes from organic search traffic- and this is according to a study by BrightEdge. However, producing great content is irrelevant if consumers are unable to find it.

Competition is fierce, and with the proliferation of websites in digital space, and thereby the explosion of content, it’s time to rethink your SEO strategy. Websites need to meet specific requirements set by search engines like Google, Yahoo, and that’s where SEO strategy becomes extremely important. Every time Google updates its search algorithm, SEO best practices must be examined and updated. Many technological advances have prompted a response from Google and other search engines, sending SEO professionals into a frenzy. So, to stay on top of the grid, Google is continuously optimizing its search algorithms to ensure they are indeed giving the best results to its users. As 2019 marches off and 2020 comes into sight, it’s essential to know and understand which new components are being added into Google’s search algorithms and which factors continue to be crucial in the next year, to develop an effective SEO strategy. Let’s look at 3 of these trends in the search engine space right now.

Read More: Want To Get More Leads? Unleash The Power Of Videos In Your B2B Marketing Strategy

Embracing User Experience:

If you want to get users to enjoy moving around online, voluntarily divulging data, and ultimately making the pages interesting for search engines, give them a good user experience. User experience is a vast topic that would go beyond discussing this. Google’s algorithm has become more smart and sophisticated, and it provides better, more relevant results. It also excludes poor quality content resulting from old discredited SEO practices like keyword stuffing and building spammed backlinks. Google now considers user experience and user engagement among its key metrics for SEO rankings. It is because the user experience is an excellent indicator of how good the website is along with the quality of the content. Accordingly, your website must have a high bounce rate, which is an indicator of the search engines like Google that the result was not useful, or it wasn’t what the user was looking for.  And if this keeps repeating, Google will eventually rank the website lower in its results. There are other user-experience metrics that signal weak or inferior quality, such as dwell time, average session duration, page views, etc. All these combined communicates Google a picture of the quality of your website as a whole. Google’s aim then is to provide the best and the most relevant results to its users. It is why user experience is highly imperative and will continue to be such an essential factor.

Search by Voice:

With more users switching from desktop to mobile, and the increased use of smart home devices, users are turning to the voice search.  According to a 2017 report by BrightLocal, 58% of consumers used voice search to find a local business. Also, ComScore predicts that by 2020, 50% of all online searches will be performed with voice search. As voice search technology keeps improving and enhancing the capabilities of connected devices, digital marketers can use the latest voice search statistics to identify new trends that reveal how our search habits continue to change.

Read More:  Rise of Influencer Marketing

Search by Image:

Visual search is another significant trend to be seen in 2020. The human brain receives most of the information in visual form. Whatever we are buying online, we use our eyes to find what we want. Therefore, visual search transfers this to the online world. Google Lens and Pinterest Lens were launched in 2017, and around the same time, the ASOS Style Match application made its foray into the digital world. With the difference in functionality, these apps had a major common feature. It allowed users to snap or upload an image of an object and get the info about it or recommendations on similar products. By 2019, people would have addressed more than a million queries to Google Lens, which itself shows the growing popularity of visual search.  Quite evidently, visual search has the potential for increasing transactions and prospects.

Conclusion

With the rise of image-based platforms, it has become relatively easy to get marketers’ attention. In other words, it has nudged us to think beyond just the text-based content. According to a report by Brightedge, images get a higher click-through rate in the search results than text pages do. Moving images work too! YouTube is the 2^nd largest search engine. With the rise of mobile use, visual search is on an all-time high. The key is staying up to date with what’s working and what doesn’t anymore.

Read More: Email Marketing − Onwards And Upwards In The Mail Inbox

The post 3 Trends Impacting SEO in 2020 appeared first on XDBS Worldwide.

Rise of the video in B2B marketing 

B2B videos were traditionally created for conferences, seminars, and sales events. However, the B2B video dynamics changed with the rise of YouTube and mobile videos. According to reports by Forrester, by 2021, more than three quarters (78%) of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video. Despite this enormous potential growth in the videos, still very few B2B marketers are using it to reach out successfully and interact with their customers. According to a recent study, only 23 out of 60 companies got a passing score for using videos to engage customers beyond just repurposing speeches or advertisements. Video also humanizes B2B marketing messages, and in a way, other marketing tactics cannot. Videos offer a distinct customer engagement advantage for those marketers who use it to showcase their company’s big ideas, engage a new generation of buyers’ who prefer interactive content, and better connect to buyers’ needs and motivations than through any other medium.

Plan on implementing videos in B2B marketing

Without a complete integration into your content strategy, videos can feel like an expensive assortment of disparate assets. B2B marketers have had success with videos when it fits into a larger content plan. Videos should be used to reinforce your message across the entire life cycle, along with using it as a medium for sharing product demos or client testimonials. Discussed below are three steps describing how you can incorporate videos into your customer life cycle:

Step 1:  Aligning production of videos to your customers’ needs across the life-cycle

Understanding the customer life cycle, B2B marketers can determine the type of video content that will most effectively engage buyers at each stage. More experienced B2B marketers also adjust video length and product quality based on customers’ changing requirements and content consumption preferences over time. What’s important is to keep the videos short in the pre-sale stages when targeting a broad audience. Buyers during this process are discovering solutions and exploring options, and therefore brief content is the key. It’s essential to keep the message concise and direct because it’s easy to lose viewers in the first 15 seconds. As they keep moving inside the sales funnel, provide them with webinars and other informative content. But make sure, the latter strategy is applied once they move further down the pipeline.

Step 2: Humanizing your video content by establishing compassion and empathy with your customers

Videos can tap into the buyers’ psyche and engage them more than any other medium. For most marketers, this will require brushing their storytelling skills to create a video that makes an authentic human connection. Stories and narratives not only create exciting or entertaining videos, but it also shows that you understand and share your buyers’ issues and concerns. Demonstrating empathy with your customers can catalyze new business opportunities as well as facilitate selling and cross-selling conversations. You can create content-rich and empathetic videos to captivate your buyers, create immersive narratives that mirror your buyers’ daily challenges and build a consistent theme to your videos through compelling storytelling.

Step 3: Picking a video platform to further the value of your videos

Online video platforms (OVP) help B2B marketers manage their video content and also track how well it performs. To prove that buyers are engaging with your video content and to determine how it affects the purchase process, B2B marketers should turn to technology that can help them:

• Consuming and organizing video content: One thing’s for sure- videos can be more expensive to produce than a white paper, datasheet, or any other social content. To maximize video usage, B2B marketers invest in an OVP. For instance, most OVPs let companies publish videos on different social channels based on metadata tags. Brightcove, a leading online video hosting platform, enables marketers to customize videos with different bumpers and trim the videos without involving an editor. It effectively creates a short social trailer that drives audiences back to companies’ websites. OVP cost varies widely, with a solution available for most budgets, so making this investment is essential, especially for B2B marketers who must tell a complex story.

• Delivering high-quality, engaging experiences: OVPs can integrate content across multiple social channels to cut down the number of times marketers need to upload and publish a single video. Top platforms also embed interactive elements into users’ audio-visual experience to personalize the video content and keep the viewers engaged. These characteristics make an OVP extremely essential in turning content into an experience that buyers will watch and remember for a long time.

• Attributing value to the video: The success metrics for video has changed considerably. The number of views or the view count doesn’t tell you anything beyond how many people clicked the play button. Top marketers must know and understand who all watched the entire video, who left after 5 seconds, and how long did they spend on a particular segment. You can integrate modern OVPs with enterprise applications like CRM and marketing automation platforms (MAPs) to inform lead generation efforts with specific video attribution data. The online video hosting platform, like Vidyard, is equipped to do multitouch attribution and can see which videos were viewed and were able to attribute revenue influence to specific content assets.

Conclusion

What works with videos is the fact that they are engaging and convey more in less time. Also, video content is more likely to rank up higher on search engine results and generate more traffic. Considering videos have a human connect, they make branded content more trustworthy. However, creating video content is not enough; it is the right strategy that would reap good returns.

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