Are you using subtitles as part of your YouTube marketing strategy? You should be, as well as these other tips.
I’ve written a lot about YouTube and how the supply chain should be leveraging it as a marketing tool. Of course, I don’t recommend just creating videos at random and throwing them up on your channel. Like any content or platform, you should approach YouTube strategically.
Here are some tips for optimizing your YouTube marketing strategy.
5 tips to improve your YouTube marketing strategy
1) Do the groundwork.
It may seem like a bigger-than-necessary investment of time at the front end, but doing your research is often “one of the most undervalued aspects of content marketing,” according to Forbes contributor AJ Agrawal.
This means getting a grasp of the existing landscape before you publish your content. Look at others in your market, and what works or doesn’t work for them.
2) Create “content buckets.”
“YouTube marketing really comes down to picking a few key areas where you feel you can deliver true thought leadership, entertainment, or some kind of value, and then mass-producing content that falls within those larger buckets,” says Agrawal.
“Buckets” refer to the broader categories your content falls into. For example, if you’re looking to create awareness about the role you play in a larger supply chain structure, one bucket might be education. Once you start organizing your thinking this way, generating quality content that falls within your larger strategy gets much easier.
3) Create a standard for your content, and stick to it.
Agrawal points out that one of the most important keys to building a loyal audience is consistency. This can be a challenge when it comes to posting quality video content, since it requires an investment of time and resources.
But it’s crucial that you “set the tone from the beginning and let your audience know what to expect,” including what kind of content you’ll be posting, and how often your audience can expect to hear from you. Once you’ve done that, stick with the promises you’ve made.
4) Use subtitles.
People are increasingly watching videos on their mobile devices in public, without the sound on. Taking this small step means that, rather than bypassing your content because they can’t hear what’s being said, people are paying attention to your videos no matter where they are.
5) Collaborate.
Content marketing at its very core benefits tremendously from collaboration. “One of the most effective ways to get your content disseminated, shared, and ultimately seen is by collaborating with other people who have audiences as well,” says Agrawal.
Collaborations are beneficial for everyone involved, particularly when you chose your partners strategically. If they share a similar audience, it boosts exposure for both parties, as well as boosting credibility within your industry.
Today’s B2B buyer’s journey involves more internet research and more social media use.
The B2B buyer’s journey has undergone a dramatic transformation, driven by digital innovation and changing buyer preferences. Research from Gartner shows that B2B buyers now spend only 17% of their total purchase journey time meeting directly with potential suppliers. Instead, they dedicate 27% of their time researching independently online.
Key Trends Shaping the B2B Buyer’s Journey
Digital-First Research Phase
According to TrustRadius’ 2023 B2B Buying Disconnect report, 87% of buyers want to self-serve part or all of their buying journey. This shift toward digital self-service has fundamentally changed how B2B companies must approach their marketing and sales strategies.
The Rise of Multi-Channel Engagement
Recent data from McKinsey (2023) reveals that B2B buyers regularly use ten or more channels throughout their purchase journey, compared to just five channels in 2016. This multichannel approach includes:
Online research and comparison tools
Social media platforms
Peer review sites
Virtual product demonstrations
Video content
Interactive webinars
The Impact of Peer Influence and Social Proof
LinkedIn’s State of B2B Marketing report highlights that 84% of B2B buyers are more likely to purchase from vendors recommended by their professional network. This emphasis on peer validation has made social proof and customer testimonials more crucial than ever.
Adapting Your Strategy to the Modern Buyer’s Journey
Content Personalization and Industry Expertise
Recent research by Salesforce indicates that 76% of B2B buyers expect vendors to understand their business needs and industry challenges specifically. This demands:
Industry-specific content creation
Personalized solution recommendations
Targeted thought leadership content
Custom ROI calculations
The Role of Digital Content in Decision Making
Content continues to play a pivotal role, but its format and delivery have evolved. According to HubSpot’s 2023 State of Marketing Report, the most effective content types now include:
Video content (preferred by 91% of B2B buyers)
Interactive tools and calculators
Case studies and success stories
Industry research and original data
Expert webinars and virtual events
Strategic Implications for B2B Companies
Understanding the modern B2B buyer’s journey is crucial for optimizing marketing and sales efforts. Companies must:
Invest in robust digital presence across multiple channels
Create high-quality, industry-specific content
Leverage social proof and customer testimonials
Provide self-service information and tools
Maintain consistent omnichannel engagement
The B2B buying process hasn’t necessarily shortened, but it has become more complex and digitally oriented. Success requires adapting to these changes while maintaining focus on delivering value throughout the buyer’s journey.
Infographic: the B2B buyer’s journey
The B2B buyer’s journey continues to evolve with technological advancement and changing buyer preferences. Companies that understand and adapt to these changes – by providing comprehensive digital resources, personalizing content, and enabling self-service options – will be better positioned to attract and convert modern B2B buyers.
Check out these marketing automation tools for email workflows, social media scheduling, and customer relationship management.
Lately it seems like everyone is talking about marketing automation. As B2B buyers increasingly demand personalized experiences through the buyer’s journey, marketers’ jobs are getting tougher, as they need to provide custom lead-nurturing content to all prospects in their databases.
And that’s where automating marketing tasks can help.
The term “marketing automation” refers to a variety of tools used to automate the process of personalizing leads’ interactions with your business. The sheer variety of these tools can sometimes be overwhelming — so we’ve pulled a few of our favorites in the categories of email workflows, social media scheduling tools, and customer relationship management.
6 marketing automation tools for supply chain and logistics marketers
This tool lets you send targeted messages to your customers, crafting them based on how they interact with your business, and making personalized messages simple. You can also keep track of conversions and create customer profiles. Our favorite part? It integrates with your mobile app or website, letting you see data in real time and trigger actions by adding in predefined rules.
2. Constant Contact
This powerful tool has some features that are unique — and can take your marketing capabilities beyond the basics. Beyond setting up and managing an automated database, Constant Contact offers Facebook fan promotion, coupons and deals, and event management.
This is an extremely effective tool for retargeting customers through re-engagement on Facebook, Twitter, and elsewhere on the web. It offers cross-device and cross-platform retargeting capabilities, as well as flexible segmentation, letting you provide customized experiences that dramatically improve your marketing efficiency. It also offers customized budgeting and full control over ad spend.
Pardot is an all-inclusive marketing automation suite, but it’s particularly strong for amping up your engagement with CRM integration. It’s a great tool for helping your sales team shorten the sales cycle. And, in addition to CRM integration, it offers email marketing, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and ROI reporting.
5. Marketo
This cloud-based marketing software lets you drive revenue with lead management and mobile marketing. It not only helps build customer relationships, but it helps you sustain them as well. Best of all, you can try it out for free until you’re sure it’s right for your business.
Bonus all-in-one tool: HubSpot
HubSpot is an inbound-marketing tool that lets you generate leads, close deals, and manage your sales pipeline from start to finish. It integrates beautifully with a content marketing strategy, with the goal of turning outbound leads into inbound ones. It includes revenue reporting, custom-event reporting, custom-event automation triggers, predictive-lead scoring, contacts and company reporting, and event-based segmentation.
What marketing automation tools does your business use?
Integrating marketing automation into your CRM strategy can improve efficiency, streamline workflows, and make communications more consistent.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been talking about different types of marketing automation, why you should be considering them, and what they can do for your business. Today, we’re talking about customer relationship management (CRM) — an area where you may not have realized that automation could help. Integrating marketing automation into your CRM strategy can improve efficiency, streamline workflows, and make communications more consistent.
So how does integration of CRM and automation look?
Pardot blogger Jenna Hanington explains it like this: “Automation … is the marketing counterpart to your CRM, focused on lead generation and personalized, one-to-one communications powered by the data collected through prospect and visitor tracking.”
Your CRM is a database, and marketing automation is “the tool that allows you to execute on the information stored in that database,” writes Hanington. Integrating the systems has the potential to cut costs and make big gains in terms of productivity. According to Salesforce blogger Matt Wesson, “Marketing automation and [CRM] are complementary tools that only reach their full potential when paired together.”
Combining CRM with marketing automation has the potential to give you more organizational bandwidth, more precision in your messaging and lead nurturing, and more measurable value in your campaigns. Here are a few examples of how CRM and marketing automation can work in tandem.
3 ways your CRM and marketing automation can work together
1) Track behavior
Combining automation with your CRM allows you to go beyond basic demographic data. You can see things like what pages your prospects are visiting, what types of content they’re interested in, and where they are in the buying cycle.
2) Tie revenue to campaigns
Marketing professionals often run into the problem of not being able to specifically tie their efforts to ROI. Creating a campaign in your marketing automation system maps it back to your CRM, so you can correlate closed deals directly with the campaigns that created them. This means you can attribute revenue directly to campaigns and more accurately measure your ROI.
3) Send targeted messages
You can use the behavioral information collected by your marketing automation tool to create and send targeted messages that are customized to your prospects’ interests and stages in the buying cycle. This means your prospects will find your messages more relevant and engaging.
In summary, integrating marketing automation with your customer relationship management database can save you time, make sales and marketing more effective, and better track ROI. This one is a no-brainer.
If you’re looking to increase your brand awareness, and quickly, here are 10 tricks to accelerate your efforts.
If you took Psychology 101 in school (or even if you didn’t), you know that people are more likely to buy from brand names they’re familiar with than those they don’t know. This goes for purchasing things like medicine, and for procuring components or parts as part of the supply chain.
That’s why so many of our clients come to us looking to build brand awareness as one of their main goals. They want to customers to know about them — and sooner rather than later.
Particularly if your business is new, you’re trying to change an existing market perception, or you have to make your marketing dollars work fast to meet a boss’ deadline, you need to grow brand awareness quickly. We’ve got some ideas to accelerate your efforts.
10 tricks to grow brand awareness quickly
1) Instagram Stories
Instagram Stories is an on-trend platform that delivers targeted content to B2B buyers and builds brand awareness with potential customers. This feature consists of sequences of content that a user posts over a 24-hour period. Besides photos, Stories can include video and Boomerangs, seconds-long motion clips that play forwards and backwards.
2) Partner with other brands
Creating a promotional partnership with a brand that is ancillary to your role in the supply chain can be a huge boost to your brand awareness, if you choose wisely in your partnership. You benefit from its image and reputation and build collegiality.
3) Start content partnerships
Again, this is all about leveraging other people’s audiences to spread the word about your brand. Reach out to the blogs or media sites your target buyers frequent to see if you can author a post for them. Invite them to guest author on your blog. Basically, create two-way content partnerships where you will ensure that your brand’s name will come across the screens of target buyers.
4) Make sharing easy
This is a great way to let your successes go to work for you. Make it easy for your audience and followers to share your content with their networks. Give them sharing options for email, social media — heck, put share links on anything and everything. Social media is a powerful tool in building your brand. Don’t underuse it.
5) Hold social media contests
Everybody loves to win a contest. Use your social media platforms to create contests in which followers submit a photo or video, and let other users vote for their favorites. Contestants will share the link with their networks, and your brand awareness grows exponentially.
6) Try paid social advertising
Facebook and Twitter ads are relatively cheap, and both platforms do a great job of making sure your content gets to your target audience. You can set metrics and customize your preferences for a targeted audience in a variety of ways. It’s one of the most effective ways to grow brand awareness quickly with a very particular audience, though you have to pay to play.
7) Infographics
These are eye-catching and colorful ways to display interesting data and statistics, and are often overlooked for the content powerhouses they are. They’re prime candidates to be shared far and wide on social media.
8) Personality
Having a memorable personality for your brand isn’t just for B2C companies. While you don’t need to hire the Old Spice Guy, letting your content have a voice and perspective is important. Buyers want to know they’re dealing with a human being.
9) Podcasts
Starting your own industry podcast, perhaps interviewing your own executives and other industry experts, is a great way to build your brand and simultaneously develop relationships with your supply chain peers.
10) Become a resource
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Your most important asset is your knowledge and expertise, not your products and services. Content marketing is all about being a trusted resource for your audience. Ditch the blatant sales pitch in your content and think about how you can help your target buyers instead.
Internet users are changing how they search, and search engines are changing in response — which means writing for SEO is changing, too.
We just wrapped up a detailed series on how SEO is changing and what that means for those of us trying to reach potential customers in the digital world. Writing for SEO means creating content that drives traffic, preferably highly qualified traffic that will convert to sales leads. Basically, you need to write your web pages in a way that tells search engines what your site is all about.
Search engines have been working overtime to keep up with the ways internet users are searching the web. Developers are frequently updating the algorithms that Google and Bing use to make sure that users are finding exactly what they’re looking for.
This means that writing for SEO is also changing. You need to keep up with the changes to make sure your content is reaching your target audiences. Trying to rank for certain keywords in each blog post you publish is a practice on the way out.
So, what now?
Make sure you are focusing your content on what your business does best and structure your content around those topics. It’s called the topic cluster model.
Do you know all the latest packaging trends? Do you love helping clients cut down on production costs? Use these areas of expertise to build website content that support your pillar content.
In this video we’ll discuss the four things to know in a changing search landscape and what you can do to stay ahead of these changes.
Video: Writing for SEO tips
I do want to mention that you should never artificially stuff your blog posts with keywords or links or images. After all, search engines will continue to evolve to help readers find what they’re looking for. They’ve gotten really good at spotting these stuffed posts, so stop wasting your time trying to outsmart them.
Your best bet to improve SEO is to create content that is valuable to your target audience. Then you should use these tips as a guide to help users looking for content like yours to find it.
