I am shifting gears today from technology to the strategic marketing side of the lidar B2B world. This won’t be for everyone, but I think it will be of value to many small businesses that struggle with knowing what to do about marketing your products and services. Please let me know what you think.
Are you looking for customers? Is your marketing program generating the kind of demand for your products or services that is helping to grow your business at the desired pace?
TechValidate and Spear Marketing Group joined forces recently to survey a group of 200 B2B senior marketing professionals from both large and small firms across the U.S.
There were a number of interesting results, but the most important theme that emerged was that these professionals considered content marketing most important to the success of their organizations’ marketing programs. This was followed by Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Social media management came in fifth.
What is content marketing? Customer success stories, white papers, webinars, videos and good old blog posts. Podcasts came in last.
The challenge as most of you know is getting people in your organization to produce compelling content. Why, because in most cases writing does not come naturally to most technical people. This needs to be recognized and a game plan designed to overcome it.
There are a number of options – identify people in-house that have the creative talent, hire someone (perhaps part-time), use freelance professionals, or work with your customers to encourage them to write a success story or document a project with a video.
The good news is the use of content marketing does not have to be expensive. Publications like Lidar News are constantly looking for quality content and we are even willing to provide some editing services if you need help.
Leads are much more likely to believe customer’s claims than they are vendor’s. That’s essentially word of mouth which is still the most effective form of marketing. Reinforce the content with a sharp ad to get prospects attention and you are on the path to success.
If you would like to read the full report click here.
