Live events. Do you remember them? With inspiring key-notes, spontaneous meetings and a great party halfway through? Last year, getting inspired this way was not an option. But events are back. And I happen to love Content Marketing World. Ahead of this Content Marketing Institute (CMI) flagship event in September, I had the opportunity to speak with bestselling author Robert Rose, CMI’s inspirational Chief Strategy Advisor. Robert helps manyRead more

AI has been in the news a lot lately. It’s making headlines for technological breakthroughs and AI is expected to revolutionize B2B marketing. But is AI something marketers in a small business should look at? AI can automate parts of many different B2B marketing functions, but it’s not magic and nothing comes for free. Whether you’re just getting started with AI or are curious to learn more, this articleRead more

Mailchimp for B2B Marketing Mailchimp is a great tool. It’s easy to use, has solid functionality and a reliable deliverability. Create an account and you will be able to build and launch an e-newsletter campaign within 30 minutes. It’s that easy. And it’s cost effective. You can send 10,000 emails a month to a list of up to 2.000 subscribers with Mailchimps Free plan. No wonder that so manyRead more

Getting started with Buyer Journey Content Mapping Mapping content to the buyer journey is and essential success factor in B2B content marketing. Content should always be thought of in terms of the buyer perspective. Naturally many organizations are used to communicating from their own context, resulting in messages from themselves or regarding the products or services they offer. But in B2B content marketing we want to map content toRead more

Embedding some B2B marketing trends in your marketing plan will not save you in 2021. This time around, your handling of key B2B marketing and sales disruptors will determine your success. Embrace a radical new approach and continuous improvement. Just paying some more attention to content marketing, marketing automation, SEO and social advertising today, may be too little too late. To quote Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, “We saw twoRead more

Partner marketing programs have proven to be massively successful to accelerate growth for many companies. By partnering with companies that offer a related portfolio, you can maximize your marketing impact while sharing the costs. With the right partner marketing strategy you can take advantage of each other’s audience, combine forces in content production and optimize commercial follow-up. In this blog we take a closer look at partner marketing strategyRead more

Featuring five deadly sins and five heavenly virtues B2B content marketing is about telling stories to convince and convert your audience. How effective are your stories? Do you always comply with the heavenly virtues of B2B content marketing to effectively convince your audience? Or does your strong desire to convert tempt you to commit one of the deadly sins? Here we discuss B2B marketing fails originating from 5 deadlyRead more

You have a Google Account and want to integrate it to your Manceppo account? Great! When you do this you will be able to: Identify company domains browsing your website, when you also install IpMeta.io and add them as leads to your campaigns / CRM system Identify how leads entered their journey on your website. Now you know whether they clicked an ad, engaged on your social media orRead more

In the end, your B2B content marketing KPI is one metric: increasing revenues at an acceptable cost. So your focus needs to be on the conversion of people from unknow audiences to loyal customers. In between these two extremes, there is a broad spectrum of stages or steps measured by a range of B2B marketing KPIs – from likes to subscriptions, followers, leads and prospects. So to measure theRead more

Executing B2B content marketing programs involves a broad scope of roles and competences. So a condition for success is having the right person for the job. Managing the proven 7 step approach to B2B Content Marketing discussed in our e-book can best be done by a ‘T-shaped content marketer’. The T-shaped marketer is the ultimate all-rounder. A T-shaped content marketer is a seasoned content marketer with expertise in multipleRead more

There are many reasons to integrate Mailchimp with WordPress. A visitor that’s ready to share his or her email address grants permission to build a relationship. That’s a valuable moment! So integrating your WordPress website with your Mailchimp account is a must for any B2B marketer working with these tools. But the integration can be done in several ways, and the option you choose impacts your marketing capabilities. SoRead more

Marketers working with different marketing technology tools often face integration problems. And these are important to tackle, because it doesn’t matter much to your customers and prospects whether they have had contact via social media, an event, an account manager or email. They assume that you know the contact history and remember who they are and what their question was—at all times and through all channels. But collecting andRead more

In our previous blog we discussed marketing tools B2B marketers can choose from to optimize their digital marketing efforts. Choosing the right tools from the rich marketing technology landscape is your first challenge, and but aligning them is you next. Which building block matches the functionality you need to communicate with potential customers per stage in their buyer journey? Lets look at the different categories of B2B marketing toolsRead more

Today B2B marketers benefit from an abundance of great and easy-to-use marketing technology tools like WordPress, MailChimp, Pipedrive and LinkedIn. Chiefmartec.com now counts a staggering 8,000 tools marketers can use. And many of them are very accessible and cost next to nothing. So, how do you choose which technology to use as a small business? B2B Marketing Technology in 10 Building Blocks First, let us organize the most importantRead more

LinkedIn Lead Generation Forms (or Lead Gen Forms) are a great way to generate marketing qualified leads on LinkedIn. As LinkedIn will pre-fill the form, there is a really low barrier for LinkedIn users to become your leads. Essentially, LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms add a call-to-action to your sponsored content ads, asking users to sign-up, download your eBook, or whatever action you’re targeting. When users click your call-to-action they’llRead more

There is no doubt that the coronavirus has a major impact on how you do business, calling for adjustments in your B2B content marketing approach. HubSpot measured a collapse in total ‘deals created’ over the last weeks in their CRM data. This implies a big impact on the commercial process, expected revenues for this year and the role of marketing to bend the curve. So how should B2B contentRead more

In just a few years the role of marketing has changed for B2B’s and as a consequence, what B2Bs expect from their B2B marketing agency and agency pricing. Today investments in marketing must help a business sell more stuff. Anything else that it achieves is nice, but it’s complementary to that main goal. At the same time there is an increasing number of challenges and trends B2B’s need toRead more

How to get started with your B2B marketing strategy Finding it difficult to get started with defining a B2B marketing strategy for your small business? Just start with a simple starting point: ‘do what you say, say what you do’. When it comes to B2B content marketing, the urge can be to present things better and more beautiful than they in fact are. But when you tell tall tales,Read more

How can you set up an owned, earned & paid media model for B2B content marketing? It’s an essential question, as high-quality content that is mapped to the buyer journey of potential customer is worthless if it is invisible to the DMU. In order to bring across content effectively to the target audience, you need to think long and hard about the owned, earned and paid media model youRead more

One of the best ways to grow your opt-in Mailchimp newsletter list is by offering great content. Adding a Mailchimp newletter opt-in to your WordPress download form can save you a lot of manual hassle. You can think of combining a content offer and newletter opt-in from two different angle: Give your audience a reason to join your Mailchimp newsletter list by requiring them to fill out a formRead more

What Marketing Automation alternatives are there for SMBs? Wikipedia refers to Marketing Automation as software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online (such as email, social media, websites, etc.) and automate repetitive tasks. According to Marketo, Marketing Automation helps marketers; streamline their lead generation, segmentation, lead nurturing and lead scoring, customer lifecycle marketing, cross-sell and up-sell, customer retention, andRead more

To determine the sales readiness of leads, Manceppo offers lead scoring functionality on both behavior and profile criteria. Lead scoring is a way to measure the likeliness of a commercial opportunity for a potential customer. The lead scoring features in Manceppo include: Demographic (or explicit) scores based on specific profile characteristics that are generally available. Think of insight about buying authority, position or company size. Activity (or implicit) scoresRead more

By connecting Manceppo to WordPress you will open up inbound marketing functionality. The connection enables you to: Create landing pages with forms for downloads Track visitor behavior across your website Build a lead score based on behavior and profile criteria Trigger email workflows in your connected Mailchimp account based on downloads on WordPress website Offering downloads like white papers, e-books and reference cases can be a great way toRead more

By connecting Manceppo to MailChimp you will open up marketing automation functionality. The connection enables you to: Add newsletter subscriptions to your WordPress call-to-action forms Trigger Automation workflows in MailChimp based on behavior on WordPress Sync MailChimp Audience data to build a 360 view of your contacts across your tools Build a lead score based on activity in emails, on your website and across other tools To connect ManceppoRead more

When your B2B marketing plan and content strategy are in place, the actual content creation phase can start. Research has shown that the content creation is seen as one of the biggest challenges for small businesses in marketing. It’s not just authors who suffer from ‘writers block’, entrepreneurs, consultants, business owners and actually complete organizations face this challenge. Creating content in itself is challenging, however, due to the rapidRead more

For a long time, B2B marketers assumed that business decisions were primarily based on rational motivations. Anticipation based on emotion was an exclusive territory for B2C marketers. However, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that emotion plays an important role in B2B as well. Emotion and rationale are two power fields that together — sometimes in agreement but sometimes in conflict — come to a decision. It’s not one or theRead more

A practical lead conversion guide The definition of a lead is a common area of disagreement between marketing and sales. Marketing is often focussed on generating relevant response based on interest in a certain topic. But the sales team is only interested in those leads that are ready to talk business. To align marketing and sales in terms of lead generation we therefore need to look at the differentRead more

Which leads from your last campaign are valuable and which ones aren’t? To determine the sales readiness of leads, marketers increasingly use lead scoring functionality in their marketing automation system. Lead scoring is a way to measure the likeliness of a commercial opportunity for a potential customer. The lead score helps determine the next best step such as transferring a lead to the sales department or triggering a certainRead more

A Review of MailChimp as Marketing Automation Tool MailChimp is a great tool, and we love it at Manceppo. It’s easy to use and has solid functionality and a reliable deliverability. To get started with marketing automation, MailChimp offers a good beginning but, fundamentally, it’s focused on executing basic drip campaigns. Marketing automation and drip campaigns are not the same thing. A drip campaign is a set of marketingRead more

In B2B content marketing the production of sufficient, appealing high quality content has been one of the biggest challenges. Additionally, the best content is in the heads of different employees, and not everyone is keen to start writing blogs, participating in webinars and taking part on social media. Facilitating the organization is of great importance. And when the decision is made to outsource the creation of content, the messageRead more

It’s often argued that content marketing has come to fruition in the past decade due to the rise of different technologies. The combination of the internet, mobile technology, cloud computing and social media has made it far easier for companies to communicate with their audience like publishers. But the success of content marketing is not due to the rise of internet technology. Its history goes way back, lets lookRead more

So what the heck is going on with search engines lately? Previously, life was so easy. You made sure your carefully chosen keywords were properly integrated in your content and that they showed up in the right places in your WordPress website. Plugins like Yoast can help you do just that, and make sure you are all set for optimized titles, URL’s, keyword density and so on. With theseRead more