This is the case with digital marketing. These days, it’s not enough to do SEO and CRO, drive traffic to your site, create a singular onboarding or checkout process, configure marketing automation, send e-blasts, and treat your customers or market segments like a monolithic audience.

Technology has moved us forward, and marketers need to get behavioral to make their marketing more personalized, granular, and effective.

Is Your Digital Marketing Behavioral?

As an example, let’s consider a business that serves multiple industries and deals with customers who are at varying stages of the decision or purchase cycle.

Typically, your company might drive traffic to your website and landing pages from social media, blogs, online advertising, and other channels. Once visitors land on a page, they might download a white paper, eBook, or demo; watch a video; sign up for a newsletter; or submit a request for quote.

These actions may trigger an auto-responder and perhaps a series of drip emails designed to automate sales conversions or your onboarding process. But what about the unique path each visitor followed before triggering this automation?

Do you know which pages were visited before the request or signup was submitted?

Do you know whether the visitor is an existing customer or a new prospect?

Are you automatically sending different emails and drip sequences based on whether the visitor requested a quote, downloaded a demo, watched a particular video on your site, or visited a particular industry page?

Are you personalizing messages according to relevant social media interactions or other online activity you may have tracked for this user?

Are you identifying potential abandonment of your site or shopping cart and mitigating this by tracking interactions with your site and delivering timely on-screen pop-up messages?

If you’re not taking into account behavioral indicators, your marketing is far less targeted, relevant, and effective than it could be. You’re also missing out on opportunities to provide better and more proactive customer support, and to help users advance through your sales or activation funnel by leveraging these insights.

How to Turn the Corner and Embrace the Behavioral Approach

While it can seem challenging to integrate your marketing systems with customer and product usage data, it’s perfectly feasible today.

Tools such as HubSpot allow you to create and maintain contact databases and track behavioral indicators, including website and social media activity, email engagement, form submissions, conversions, and data from other integrated software. These data points provide the behavioral insights to configure and optimize your marketing automation.

With additional tools, such as Zendesk, Mixpanel, Autopilot, MailChimp, and many others, you can connect your customer, product, and engagement data to create personalized and customized automation sequences. For example, if you’re marketing a software solution, you can track product activation and even specific feature usage or issues users encounter as they begin using your demo or product.

All of these insights allow you to create different onboarding, purchasing, support, or educational paths based on each customer’s unique characteristics and behavioral profile.

For example, if a website visitor watched a specific video but didn’t sign up for your demo or buy your product, why not send a series of emails showcasing other relevant videos and encouraging them to try your demo or get a one-time discount by making a purchase now?

If you’re selling and supporting a SaaS product, and a user has not gotten very far into your demo product or its features, why not send them a series of emails designed to walk them through the early stages and educate them on the more advanced functionality available to them?

By leveraging these behavioral insights, your marketing efforts will be more relevant because they’ll speak to the unique status, needs, interests, and decision stage for each individual. This naturally translates into better engagement and conversions, as well as higher quality support and stronger customer loyalty.

Your marketing will also be more effective because you’ll be creating a truly custom-tailored experience that feels like a personalized interaction with each individual customer. This is far better than a batch-driven and mechanical approach that leaves customers feeling like they’re just another data point in an automated system.

Share Your Thoughts or Questions

Have you turned the corner and gotten behavioral in your digital marketing? Are you looking for more help and suggestions on how to get started?

Share your thoughts below, or connect with me to ask questions or request some helpful hints.

Let’s get started by reviewing some revealing findings from the Content Marketing Institute’s research report: B2B Content Marketing: 2017 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends–North America.

According to the CMI’s report, 89 percent of B2B marketers are using content marketing to attract and convert customers. This is a huge number, and it’s underscored by the fact that 70 percent of B2B content marketers are planning to do more content marketing in 2017 than 2016. So content marketing is not only a hugely important strategy but is also set to grow in the next year.

How successful are these efforts? An overwhelming 75 percent describe their content marketing approach as at least moderately successful, but only 22 percent say it’s extremely or very successful. Over half said they are only moderately successful.

Similarly, an overwhelming 88 percent of respondents say their content marketing strategy is effective in helping them reach their goals, but only 34 percent rate it extremely or very effective. Over half of respondents say it’s merely moderately effective. Furthermore, only 17 percent report being much more successful than they were one year ago.

The good news is their efforts and strategies are successful and effective, but it’s moderate for most and worse for the rest. These are clear signs of problems. Why aren’t B2B marketers more successful in their content marketing?

In my experience, a big factor is usually a lack of expertise, resources, and strategy. While many B2B marketers have embraced content marketing and are committed to it, many are relatively new to the game and don’t necessarily have the dedicated resources or strategic expertise to get the most out of their efforts.

The CMI’s findings back this up. Only 28 percent of content marketers say they’re in the sophisticated or mature phase of content marketing. More than one-third are either taking their first steps or undergoing growing pains and struggling to create a cohesive strategy and plan.

When you’re just starting out in the early stages of content marketing, it can be a learn-as-you-go process. This usually means trial and error and a lot of inefficiency. It’s difficult to define the right strategy, develop a plan, and execute it effectively when you don’t really know what you’re doing.

Even if you have a strategy, it may not be well-defined or optimized. As the CMI discovered, only 37 percent of B2B content marketers have a documented content marketing strategy. 41 percent have a strategy, but it’s not documented.

When strategies and plans aren’t clearly documented and defined, there’s a good chance they aren’t well thought out and lack quality.

To make matters worse, 59 percent of companies doing content marketing don’t have clarity about what an effective or successful program looks like. In other words, they may be doing content marketing, but they can’t truly measure their own success. They don’t know what it would look like!

On top of this, we have the issue of resources. 55 percent of content marketers have only one person or, at best, a small team working on content marketing for the entire organization. Of course, if you’re a small or medium-sized business, you may not have a large in-house team or department to manage your content marketing. But it’s common, even in larger companies, for only one person or a small team to handle content marketing.

What does all of this mean for you and your business? To me, it points to a fundamental problem I’ve helped many businesses address. If you want to develop a proper content marketing strategy, execute it, and achieve real success, you need to have the right expertise and resources in place.

Unless you have experts on staff or you outsource to an agency or team with proven experience, you’ll be at a disadvantage. While you can learn a lot about content marketing from online resources such as blogs, webinars, eBooks, and research reports, it will always be far less efficient and effective to learn as you go. It also means you’ll have a much harder time developing your strategy and creating the volume and quality of content you need to achieve success.

For B2B marketers achieving higher levels of success and seeing major increases in their performance, content creation and strategy are the biggest keys. 85 percent of B2B marketers cited higher quality and more efficient content creation as one of the reasons for an increase in their overall content marketing success. 72 percent cited development or adjustment of their content marketing strategy as one of the primary reasons for their improved success.

The best way to achieve these keys to success is to have the right resources—right now.

With ROI a focal point and so many businesses needing to attract and convert customers in the near future, there’s no time for trial and error or modest success. It pays to equip your business with the right strategy, expertise, and content marketing execution from the outset. While it can seem cheaper in the short term to go it alone or use the resources you have, it costs more money over time and will potentially cost you a lot in missed opportunities and sales.

When you’re thinking about getting started with content marketing or trying to build on your early efforts and improve your success, consider hiring an expert or a team of experts—whether as direct employees or through an outside agency or consultant. Even if you already have internal team members working on content marketing, the additional resources and collaboration with experts can enhance their efficacy and ensure you’re executing the right strategy and creating the required output to get results for your business.

What are you seeing in your business?

Understanding each of the five generations and its unique sensibilities is the key to driving effective marketing strategies, particularly in B2B marketing, where most of these generations might be in play as decision makers or influencers.

Ideally, you need to adapt your messaging, marketing channels, and efforts to each generation. This might seem daunting and challenging, but it can be done by developing unique campaigns and approaches when your marketing personas are predominantly of one generation.

For example, if you’re doing account based marketing and targeting top executives at a strategic account, and they are predominantly Baby Boomers you might combine traditional elements, such as telephone calls and face-to-face meetings, with email. If you are targeting Generation X, where work-life balance is often a major concern, you may want to make an emotional appeal to simplifying work enabling more free time.

If you are targeting Generation Y or Generation Z, you’ll want to focus on social media and digital marketing almost exclusively, while keeping in mind that face-to-face interactions—whether in person or virtual—may be critical. These generations are also more collaborative in their decision-making as well, often making purchasing decisions in groups, so you may need structure your strategy and approach accordingly.

However, the most feasible and economical approach is to take a multi-channel and multi-faceted approach that incorporates messages and channels that appeal to all the generations you’re targeting. Define and research the generations you’re targeting and the roles they play in purchasing decisions. Prioritize them and choose your channels and develop your messages accordingly. Try to strike the right balance so you can play to your predominant generation(s) while still engaging and converting others.

Looking to the Future

As more companies and organizations research and explore generational marketing, there will be more opportunities for learning, discovery, and application of best practices. The extrapolation of these insights and the challenge of how to apply them is a broad topic worthy of further discussion, so I intend to talk more about the five generations and their implications for business in future articles.

In the meantime, I encourage all marketers and organizations to delve further into generational marketing and see what it can do for you and your customers.

Your Thoughts?

Are you apply generational marketing into your marketing strategies and tactics?  Please share your experiences.

Last post we highlighted the 5 Generations at Work.

As we can see in the table above, the formative experiences of each generation shape its values and preferences. For example, maturists or traditionalists grew up in the World War II era and may have experienced wartime rationing. As many of us who market to this generation know, they’re often more cautious and look for security and stability in making decisions.

This is captured in their attitude toward work life, where the goal was all about finding a job you could keep for life or at least until retirement. We can also see it in their quintessential aspiration, which was home ownership. Having a steady job and your own home meant stability, security and success.

When it comes to marketing, members of this generation are indeed traditionalists. They prefer formal letters as a communication medium and prefer face-to-face meetings when communicating and making decisions. Importantly, they are largely disengaged with technology. The signature product for this generation wasn’t the computer or a mobile device. It was the automobile.

In contrast, Baby Boomers are often more experimental and free-spirited. Events such as Woodstock and the Moon landings shaped their sense of possibilities and a rejection of traditionalism. Their key aspiration has been job security, particularly as the workplace evolved and jobs became something that might not be reliable or might be worth giving up to take a better opportunity elsewhere.

While television is the signature technological development for Baby Boomers, they were among the earliest adopters of information technology. Thus, while their communication and decision-making preferences lean more toward telephone communications and face-to-face meetings, they increasingly go online and are open to email as an alternative preference. They live in a much more technological world than maturists or traditionalists, so a hybrid approach of traditional and digital marketing is often effective with this audience.

When we get to Generation X, we arrive at the first generation born and raised in a world of computer and mobile technologies. This is the generation that saw the arrival of the first PC and the first mobile breakthroughs. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism signaled a break from the world of their Traditionalist and Baby Boomer parents and grandparents, just as technology was about to completely reinvent the way we communicate and do business.

For Generation X, the personal computer is the signature product, and this generation formed the first wave of “digital immigrants,” moving to new platforms for communications and doing business. E-mails and now text messages are generally their preferred modes of communication. This makes online and digital marketing critical for reaching and engaging this audience, though face-to-face and telephone interactions are also welcomed if time permits.

With Generation Y, we’ve seen a further shift toward technology and digital interactions. This is the first generation in which digital is part of the native cultural landscape. Generation Y values freedom and flexibility, which fits perfectly with the mobility and versatility of newer technologies and modes of communication.

The advent of Google, Twitter, social media and mobile technologies has driven this generation to transcend personal computing in favor of tablets and smartphones as well as social media and texting. Traditional marketing is far too archaic and ineffective for this generation, although researchers found that there is still some preference for face-to-face meetings when it comes to making financial decisions.

Finally, we get to Generation Z, which is a curious combination of traditional concerns with an almost dependent relationship with technology. Generation Z has been shaped by experiences of instability and risk, whether it’s the economic downtown in the early 2000s, the threat of global terrorism, climate and environmental changes, or current waves of populism and challenges to traditional institutions.

This has driven this generation to be more concerned with security and stability, much like maturists or traditionalists, and, interestingly, it embraces its own version of face-to-face communications through video streaming and mobile apps such as Facetime or Skype.

Above all, this generation is inseparable from technology and knows no other options. It is entirely dependent on IT. This has also shaped Generation Z’s attitudes toward careers and purchasing products. Its members have embraced virtual employment and working for pop-up businesses, and they use digital crowd-sourcing to support and fund new products and services. Technologies such as 3D printing, nanocomputing, and driverless cars could become the signature products of this generation, leading to profound breakthroughs that make future generations even more integrated with technology.

Your Thoughts?

What do you see in your marketing mix?  Are these Generational difference showing up in your business?

This is the first time in history that five generations of people are in the workforce, which means it’s also a historic and unprecedented time for generational B2B marketing.

In generational marketing, each generation is considered as a distinct archetype or model for driving product development, marketing and customer service. We look at each generation’s formative experiences, characteristics, mindset and preferences. This yields insights that help us develop the right products and marketing messages, and it helps us identify the right channels and methods to engage each audience and grow our business.

Let’s take a look at these five generations and understand what their unique characteristics mean for marketing.

For our purposes, I like to use the generational breakouts developed by researchers at Barclays and the University of Liverpool. They teamed up to research each generation and its preferences for technologies, communication and making financial decisions. Here’s a look at the summaries from their report.

Are you seeing the impact of different generations on your marketing?

Before anything else, you need to know your target market

A shortsighted marketer can only talk about going ‘viral’ and managing social media accounts with photos and half-baked articles. The real experts will immediately ask you who you want your campaign to reach specifically.

Keep in mind that the internet is a singular experience for each user no matter who they are or what they represent. These users get to choose their content and what they see most of the time, so your market is already there. What your strategy needs to do is to figure out how to reach these people.

That’s when you talk strategy

Once you’ve figured out who you’re marketing to, it’s now a matter of developing good content and delivering it to websites and services they frequent. The format of this content, how often and where it’s posted as well as other factors can affect the ‘effectiveness’ of these strategies, but it’s highly-recommended that you provide a full range of content and marketing materials online. Once you’ve captured a seeking client, they want to see all your media before they contact you.

Here are the B2B lead generation strategies that really work:

• Volume matters. Depending on your audience and how many people you’ve captured on your social media pages and YouTube channels, you may either be producing too much or too little content. While there isn’t always an exact number, a good balance all the time can give you consistent results that can easily be improved.

• Get feedback. While leads, conversions, views and traffic matter as they speak about hard numbers that can be readily-translated into ROI, the quality of your videos, whitepapers and other posts are just as important. Getting feedback through comments and surveys can help you refine your content and build up your mindshare and thought leadership in your business community.

• Market your brand. While you’re not specifically sending your brand message to B2B clients, you have to create brand awareness since you want to create meaningful relationships. You have to add to your clients’ brand stories so it’s imperative that you deliver brand awareness.

• Invest in the right technology. If you’ve done your homework right, it’s important that you know how your target market gets your content. This way, you’d know if you have to invest in email marketing, whitepapers, blogs or videos. Blindly choosing tools without good reason can only result in failed online media marketing investments.

• Create useful content and curate the best out there. One of the most important things to remember about online marketing is that you need to add value and collaborate. This means that your content should give people free advice so it demonstrates your expertise. But it’s not enough that you create your own content. You have to find quality content from other websites and sources like independent studies, case studies and even customer feedback.

If you thought that good strategies are websites, email marketing or Facebook profiles, you are sorely mistaken. These are only tools for delivery—what you should focus on is your content and research.

What are you seeing in your B2B marketing campaigns?  What’s working for you?

There are many types of marketing. The most common one is outbound marketing, where you sell your product or services to prospects. Some common examples are print advertisements, email marketing, and even cold calling. However, there’s also inbound marketing. With today’s new media and the Internet of Things, it seems like inbound marketing is the next best way to generate leads for your B2B business.

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is the process of leading potentials to find your company before they even purchase your products or avail of your services. With this kind of marketing, you help your leads to find your company instead of pushing your company to them. They come to you instead of you coming to them and selling your company. There are many ways of inbound marketing. One way is to provide relevant content to your target audience and simply putting yourself out in the field.

Why should you consider inbound marketing?

Perhaps the biggest overlook advantage of inbound marketing is the increased chances of engaging prospective clients. Developing content that your target audience likes would actually even help educate your existing customer base. Inbound marketing, therefore, is not just for getting leads but actually retaining existing clients. By leveraging inbound marketing, B2B marketers get to hook new leads, but at the same time, strengthen relationships with existing customers.

According to New Breed Marketing, 93% of buying cycles start with online searches. Therefore, companies that rank higher in search engines get free advertising. Companies that run blogs have 97% more inbound links, and those who blog 15 or more times a month get up to 5 times more traffic as compared to those who do not blog. Those who increased their blog posts to 6 to 8 times a month doubled their leads. Just by looking at these numbers, there are surely many advantages that inbound marketing can do for your business.

HubSpot also reported that outbound leads cost 61% more than inbound leads, making inbound marketing cost way less than traditional marketing. With these savings, it’s not surprising that many B2B marketers are considering inbound marketing nowadays, especially with the fact that the returns in leads are quite significant.

Inbound marketing, with the proper tools and content, can help you meet your clients where they want to be. It focuses on creating high quality content that is at par with what customers expect, and the topics that they are interested in. Therefore, it draws prospects and leads towards what your company can offer because they want to know more about your products and services.

In addition, leads generated with inbound marketing are more interested into becoming paying clients, as opposed to those that are generated with outbound marketing. They see your B2B company as somebody who is willing to give them solutions and some help with their problems, and not just some salesman who’s looking at his monthly sales report.

What are you finding in your marketing efforts?  Are you using inbound techniques?

Let me start by saying, “create videos that provide actionable value”. Give your audience a reason to watch. For instance, product demonstrations, case studies or end-user videos educate your audience with real-world applications of your solutions. Providing footage of your solutions in action can go a long way in moving prospects through the sales funnel. There are many considerations you should run through regarding the type of videos you could produce (too many to put in this post), but here are some areas you should focus on to make a great impression through YouTube.

Video Titles

Use titles that contain terms and phrases that customers would use to search for information. YouTube can be searched in the same manner as other social websites and search engines. When buyers look for videos relevant to their needs, they should easily find content that informs and educates about your solutions. Therefore, your titles should include terms that reflect the issues they face and/or the solution you provide to address those issues.

Create a Video Channel

One of the best ways to draw prospects to your video content is to create a YouTube channel that represents your brand and/or your audience’s issues. Give the channel a name that clearly indicates the content you’ll be distributing. Once you’ve uploaded a significant number of videos, create playlists to organize videos by themes such as how-to tutorials, product features or funny videos. Be sure to organize content within ‘buckets’ that can easily be searched by YouTube users.

Use Comment Streams

The Comment section can be an effective way to draw viewers to your YouTube channel or video, and to engage with subscribers when they comment on your content. The Comment stream offers an opportunity to join a conversation and (appropriately) mention your content. Making comments (keep it positive!) on other members’ videos is one technique to draw attention to your channel. Once subscribers have made comments about your content, thank them for commenting and respond to feedback and questions promptly.

Audience Responses

While YouTube and other social media channels may be perfectly good outlets for distributing information and branding messages, followers really connect when they see you engage with them. Effective social media marketing requires channel surveillance and audience response. Don’t use YouTube as a broadcast station; be in touch with your audience as frequently as possible.

YouTube as Part of “Omni-channel”

Use your YouTube channel as one tool in a blend of multimedia channels which should include social sites like Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram and Twitter. Customers don’t typically engage with brands through a single channel. They should find links to your videos in content you post on your other social media accounts. A word of caution: avoid linking to videos in comments you make others’ accounts unless the link provides a direct value to the conversation.

YouTube has grown to become an effective marketing tool in the fight to gain your customer’s attention. Marketers need to take advantage of all YouTube’s features relevant to marketing purposes (check out the Analytics tools) and use this channel as a way to support the other digital marketing tactics you are using.

Let me know how you deploy YouTube – and thanks for reading!

Here are 10 of my favorite email tactics for drip marketing. Mixing them in with your marketing messages will infuse some real value into your campaigns.

1. Industry research – Send relevant data that may be useful to your prospects and customers. Information about trends or opinions can provide valuable insight to your email recipients. One useful strategy is to conduct your own survey and furnish the results as part of a drip campaign.
2. Industry news – Share industry-specific news with each market segment. Creating awareness about important news can be an effective method of building trust. Sending a brief message with a link to a recent news article provides a reason to make contact – and a way to remain relevant in your prospects’ eyes.
3. Newsletter subscription offers – Use email to invite prospects and customers to subscribe to your newsletter. But avoid simply asking for a subscription. Give them a sample of the content to whet their appetite for more. One effective technique is to splash a few headlines with article abstracts and a Read More link to a signup form.
4. Best practices examples – Businesspeople are constantly seeking ways to improve. Cases studies or examples of best practices can be helpful to your B2B audience. By providing information that helps people in their work life, your brand earns trust and loyalty.
5. White papers – Thought leadership can be a useful strategy, and sharing white papers through email drip campaigns can earn you followers. White papers filled with relevant statistics and data has been shown to be an effective component to drip marketing.
6. Infographics – Share visually appealing infographics for quick consumption. This strategy works well in B2B campaigns because the audience is often sifting through multiple emails during work. An infographic provides easily digestible relevant information, providing a valuable reason to reach out.
7. Webinar – Invite people to a free webinar you are hosting or participating in that will provide value to your email contacts. One effective technique is to introduce event topics and presenters in the email message. Be sure to make registration and attendance easy for everyone.
8. Free Resources – Provide a link to a tool or resource that will be helpful to your contacts. Including your blog as a resource can increase traffic and, potentially, build your blog audience. Sharing free resources can be an effective way to show that you want to be helpful.

Find ways to continually provide fresh, relevant, helpful content and you should find your open rate getting better. Let me know some of your most effective drip campaign tactics. Share your stories below.

Before taking the plunge to create your Pinterest boards, or if you already have, it is important to know about the site so you get the most out of your efforts. Here are 5 things to know about marketing on Pinterest:

1. Number of users. There are over 50 million users on Pinterest. That alone should be reason enough to consider it as a marketing avenue. You need ways to reach your audience and Pinterest may just be one of them.
2. Demographics. Knowing the demographics of those using the site can also help you determine what to market on it. Pinterest users are five times more likely to be women, are majority white, and are typically between the ages of 18-49. They also have some college education and earn over $50,000 annually.
3. Visual impact. The whole concept behind Pinterest is having visual boards of things that people have pinned on them. It’s all visually based, which means that you need to make sure you are using good images that will catch people’s attention and make them want to pin it to their board.
4. Content counts. Although the image is the first thing people see, the content that it is linked to is going to matter. Give people content they will want to pin and share with others.
5. Getting followers. It is important on Pinterest to have followers. You can gain them by adding a Pinterest button to your website and product pages, encouraging people to pin your items, and by following others. 

The good things about using Pinterest for marketing are that you won’t spend lots of money or time doing it. With putting in even 15 minutes per day toward your Pinterest marketing efforts you can help to build a following and get your business spread around to others. That’s marketing that is worth trying, just be careful that you don’t get addicted and spend your days pinning other recipes and do-it-yourself home decorating ideas!

What do you think?