Inbound Marketing Age

Demand Gen Report recently published the results of their B2B Buyers Survey 2018, their seventh annual survey on buyers’ purchasing behaviours. This year they polled 259 executives in a variety of industries, including High Tech (31%), Manufacturing (19%) and Professional Services (14%).

B2B buyer behaviour has evolved considerably since the first survey was launched in 2012. While B2B buying has often been synonymous with a long-term research process and a complex eco-system of decision-makers, buyer behaviour has expanded in a number of ways.

Here is our take on the four biggest marketing insights from this year’s survey.

More than 87 per cent of online marketers now use video content. And on Facebook, video is the top performing content type - over 100 million hours of video are watched on Facebook every day.

Social media video steams ahead of photos, links and status updates in terms of user engagement.

So what can your business do to improve your video marketing metrics on Facebook? 

Get ranked highly by Facebook

Facebook controls what people see on their newsfeed using algorithms that predict their interests.

The way that Facebook ranks video was updated earlier this year. Video content that gets sought out and returned to by viewers is now ranked favourably. Additionally, social media video that has visibly inspired interaction and conversation is given greater prominence. 


Where do B2B marketers start with voice searches?

As individuals, AI assistants and smart speakers such as Alexa and Siri are now a familiar partner in many peoples' everyday search for answers, solutions and content.

But since they’re usually more closely associated with B2C brands, do B2B marketers really need to worry?

Consider how many people are using social media on a daily basis - it’s such a staple in modern living. Marketers can take full advantage of this audience by providing video content that resonates with them.

When you’re ready to embark on a video marketing campaign, you will need to write a script and formulate a plan as to how and where you will share your content.

One of the most common questions to arise in any video creation process is this: just how long should the video be?

Growing a business can be hard, but it’s the only way to survive in today’s competitive market.

Even if rapid growth is not your goal, you will still lose customers over time – so you will have to maintain your marketing momentum month by month.

So what’s the best way to grow your business?

Let’s start with a reversal exercise – what would you need to do to ensure you didn’t grow – or worse, lost business?

Think for a moment.

What steps would you take, or not take, to ensure your business shrank?

Google is notoriously tight-lipped about its ranking factors, and that doesn't look set to change in 2018.

It’s no secret that SEOers base their entire careers on educated guesses, experimentation and speculation.

Will Google ever disclose their algorithms? Who knows.

Will you ever reach page one? With hard work and perseverance, yes.

It's not always easy to predict the future, but it's worth a shot. Video marketing is ever on the rise. In one survey, 64 percent of marketers admitted that video is set to dominate their content marketing strategy.

Video marketing is a venture with high ROI and buckets of creative potential.

In this blog, we will have a look at some of the most alluring new trends when it comes to video marketing.

Topic clusters are an essential content strategy tool to help you simplify your content creation and concentrate your efforts around the manufacturing subjects that matter most to your customers.

In this blog post, we explore how topic clusters work, why they’re so useful for your content strategy and how you can go about creating them.

You might be missing out on an easy opportunity to improve your company’s website performance: image optimisation.

Google recommends image optimisation as one of the top three fixes for slow page load time. Images make a staggering difference and often account for most of the bytes downloaded on a page.

Images deliver the core message of your content. Including at least one image in a post can potentially double share rates, and help readers to retain more information than text alone.

Removing images from your site isn’t viable, but reducing their weight is.

Kaizen is achieving continuous improvement through the application of small, ongoing positive changes - continually improving your business, your processes and your ways of working - one bit at a time.

No matter what industry you’re in, continuous improvement is vital if you want to stay ahead of the game. No company survives in the long-term by sticking to the status quo.

For those that really get inbound marketing, you’ll understand what I mean when I say that your inbound marketing methodology needs to be a process continual improvement.

The rising popularity of mobile devices has changed the way consumers search for information online, and marketers are already adapting their search engine optimisation tactics in response.

In 2018, SEO needs to consider the prominence of AI-powered voice search too.

According to Google, 1 out of 5 searches come from voice queries. 50 percent of smartphone users use voice technology on their device, and 33 percent use it daily.