We hope you enjoy this handy recap of the B2B content marketing articles that caught our attention this week.
- Plant the seeds for evergreen content: Evergreen assets are the Energizer Bunnies of content marketing, generating web traffic, social shares, conversion, and boosting both brand visibility and credibility long after your disposable assets have jumped the shark. This Forbes article by Jayson DeMers sets out a solid game plan for building your next evergreen piece, with advice on choosing the right topics, what components to include and how occasional maintenance can keep its engine running for a good, long time.
- 4 tools to power your marketing with LinkedIn: It’s so easy to let LinkedIn account maintenance tasks roll over from one day’s to-do list to the next, untouched. In this Social Media Today article, Yvonne Lyons walks you through four LinkedIn resources you can use to build and maintain important business relationships, from customers to influencers. Try one each week, and in a month you’ll finally be able to check this one off your list.
- Customer relationships in B2B: “It’s complicated”: McKinsey recently reported that B2B customer experience ratings lag far behind our B2C counterparts, with approval ratings of less than 50%. This CMS Wire piece by Chris Wright breaks the B2B customer experience into five commonly overlooked touchpoints to explain how most companies may be falling short and how they can improve. Sure, B2B buying journeys can be more complicated than for our counterparts in B2C, but there’s no reason we can’t give them a run for their money when it comes to satisfying our customers.
- (Brain)power of persuasion: Getting into customers’ heads is so important in marketing that it only makes sense for us to tap human psychology and neuroscience for effective persuasion strategies. While your cohorts are crunching numbers and analyzing the data, take a moment to focus on why we do what we do: to engage customers and prospects. Laurynas Skupas connects the dots between neuroscientific principles and how we can use them to better captivate our audiences in this readable rundown of five neuromarketing principles on MarketingProfs.
- Tech trends to watch: Sifting through announcements of every new tech tool to separate passing fads from transformative technology is a full-time job. Fortunately for B2B marketers, it’s a job Forrester has already tackled for us. In recent research, its analysts identified the most promising emerging technologies that B2B marketers would be wise to watch in the next 3 to 5 years. Azadeh Williams sorts them into B2B and B2C trends and timelines in this forward-looking article in CMO from IDG.
Now you can think about putting all this reading to good use in your next outstanding piece of content! Keep this Buyer-Focused Content Marketing Handbook packed with best practices close at hand while you work.
