Gated Content: A Bane or a Boon for B2B Marketers?

Inbound Marketing is all about creating and publishing high-quality content, so it’s no surprise that it has been the rage for many years. Gating content is an effective and standard way adopted by marketers to generate leads. However, some B2B marketers prefer not to gate their content for easy access to the users. This gives rise to an unresolved question:

Whether content should be gated or not? 

 

Before you decide and choose a particular content marketing strategy, here are some benefits of both gated and ungated content:

Benefits of Gated Content

• Generation of High Quality Leads: Generating superior leads is the biggest benefit that gated content offers to businesses. It helps you to collect specific information about leads which can be further used to nurture them into a sale.
• Advanced Control: It helps prevent your content piece from being read and used by anonymous users or competitors. You can also seek more information about users through progressive profiling.
• More Valuable Content: By gating information, it adds more value to your content rather than keeping it form-free and assists many companies in establishing high revenue streams too.

Benefits of Ungated Content         

• Heavy Site Traffic and Large Opportunities: By making your content public/ungated, it helps attract more traffic to your site. With better SEO and more content sharing, it supports you in building a loyal audience.
• Increased View of Content: Ungated content receives 10 times more views than gated content as there aren’t any opt-in forms that people need to fill with their personal details.
• Enhanced SEO: As a B2B marketer, using ungated content can provide you keyword-optimized indexed pages to help you attain your goal of visitor-to-lead conversion

So, the debate between gated and ungated content remains unsolved as both tactics provide favourable results either way. The answer to the question, whether to gate your content or not varies depending upon the value of the content piece.

According to Mike Volpe, CEO of Hubspot, “gating your content helps you identify qualified leads who want to be nurtured.” On the other hand, Neil Patel, co-founder of KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg says, “From my experience, gating content creates a lot of backlash. Opt-in forms give me 3x the leads of any other method, but they tick people off... by a lot.”

Maintaining balance between Gated and Ungated content

 

So, it concludes that there is no as such perfect answer to this question. Ideally, a blend of gated and ungated content can drive revenue for your business. By adopting a content-pillar approach, you can maintain a healthy balance between gated and ungated content strategies for achieving your objective.

Under this approach, a central piece of content is termed as “pillar” which is gated whereas it is surrounded by several ungated pieces. This approach helps B2B marketers with better lead generation as the ungated content drives traffic to the pillar (gated) which further transforms the traffic into leads.

So, you need to test whether gated or ungated content will work well for your business! Also, you need to be careful while taking the decision as it can affect your entire business.

3 Simple Ways to Increase Your Social Media Engagement

One of the most disheartening moments in social media marketing is when no engagement seems to happen. You post with an intention to get traction on social media, but most of the time don’t get the desired results. It not only leaves you frustrated but also cost you dearly. It’s not difficult to make people like your posts, but it is a little trickier to make them share and comment on your posts, i.e. increase your social media engagement.

So, how can you engage your audience on social media? Check out the following tips:

Grab their attention: The best way you can engage your audience with your brand is by posting something relevant for them, something they want to see. If you are successful in stopping them from scrolling down the news feed, you’ve got their attention. To do that, you need to:

• Find out why your audience is on social media. For example, if someone is using Facebook to read news stories, you can share newsworthy content.
• Entertain your audience while sharing your brand’s message with them. That’s what social media is for. 

Make them react: The other best thing is to inspire different reactions for your posts to engage people. Moving away from a simple “like” button, Facebook has now included five emojis to react to posts, expressing love, laughter, wonder, sadness, and anger. You can:

• Make use of emojis in your post to trigger an emotion in your audience. If your post is humorous, you can include a laughing emoji in the post to make your audience feel that what you are sharing is amusing.
• Share any blog post showcasing your business offerings and ask people to share their reaction using reactions on Facebook.

Intrigue them: Apart from likes and comments on social media, there is another way to engage people, i.e. to use social media to intrigue your audience. You can:

• Share some compelling data so that people want to click and go to your website to learn more about your services.
• Reveal a new product or some exciting updates by sharing it on social media. You must have seen those product “leaks” on social media. This is what they do. Initially, provide a few details, then compel them to visit your website by clicking on your website link to know more.

To get the most of b2b social media marketing, start following these sneaky ways and make your audience comment, like, share, and click on your posts.

3 Reasons Inbound Marketing Beats the Traditional Forms of Marketing

All those companies that still rely on the traditional forms of marketing or believe that inbound marketing is just a passing craze are wrong in their perception. They’ll soon be looking for inbound marketing experts as they’ll realize that inbound marketing is the most effective form of marketing that makes your potential customers reach your business.

 

Image credit: flickr.com

You don’t need to be convinced so easily. Take a look at the following three facts that show why inbound marketing outperforms traditional marketing:

Improved Customer Relations: With inbound marketing, you deliver valuable content to your potential customers that helps them through their purchase journey and provides better insight into your product or services. Beyond providing valuable content to your customers, the implication of improved customer relationship through quality content can benefit your business in many ways such as increase leads and recurring sales, improve branding, create advocates, and much more.

Cost Effective: Inbound marketing gets you real and measurable return on investment as compared to the traditional marketing in which return on investment is difficult to measure. According to Hubspot, inbound marketing, per lead, costs 62 percent less than that of traditional marketing. The reason inbound marketing campaigns are more cost effective is that you send your message to a targeted audience instead of spreading it blindly to everyone.

Quality Traffic & Leads: Inbound marketing is all about producing the right content at the right time. With inbound marketing, it’s not you who’s running after prospects. It’s the other way round; you’re helping your target audience reach out to you. That helps you generate high-quality leads. So, when you produce frequent content, prospects are most likely to visit your website. All you need to do is nurture and convert them.

The list is not exhaustive but sufficient to prove that inbound marketing is more effective than outbound marketing. If you are not using it, you are most likely to miss the opportunity to develop a good and long-lasting relationship with your prospects.

Become a Customer-Centric Company Leveraging Social Media

With increasing social media usage around the globe, businesses are using b2b social media marketing platforms to approach and engage with potential customers/clients, answer their queries, reinforce brand messaging and provide targeted offers. So, if you want to build a customer-focussed business that is approachable and values its loyal customers, leverage social media platforms and stay connected.

Let’s know how to refocus attention on customer experience leveraging social media strategy:

Develop a Learner’s Mindset: Nowadays, all social media platforms run on social media algorithms that are consistently changing the environment of social networks. So with the changing scenario, it is important to develop a learner’s mindset and understand the algorithms in depth. The more you learn, the more you will be able to develop a better social media strategy.

Engage More with Customers: Businesses are clamouring everywhere to provide the best experience to their customers. As emotions can drive one’s decision, it is important to create an emotional bonding with your customers. Businesses that use this strategy are set to outperform their competitors.

Welcome Customers Feedback on Regular Intervals: Are you sure that you are delivering the best services to your customers? Feedback from customers is what influences your product or service roadmap. There is no better way to know how your customers’ experience has been throughout other than capturing their feedback in real time. To do this, you can make outbound calls to your customers, deliver post-interaction surveys via emails and calls, listen through social media etc.

As customer expectations keep on increasing, businesses need to start improving their customer experience by implementing the right social media strategy that aligns with organizational goals and objectives.

Why We Love Content Marketing (And You Should, Too!)

What is content marketing? What role does it play in running a business? How can marketers sell smarter by leveraging content marketing? These are just some of the questions that play through the minds of business owners. In order to run your business efficiently, you need to understand content marketing and its nuances.

What is content marketing?     

Content marketing is used by marketers to attract new customers by creating and publishing useful content. It is the fuel that ignites the entire sales process with the help of blogs, eBooks, case studies, social media, white papers, videos, etc.

Role of content marketing  

Creating valuable content can set you apart from others and help you resonate with your target audience. Let us take a look at the roles that content marketing play in running a business successfully: 

• User Engagement: Content marketing aims at strengthening your relationship with people reading and sharing your content (usually your fans and advocates) and drives high user engagement.
• Brand Establishment: Content marketing is a great way to establish your brand in the competitive market. With value added content, you can win the trust of your users and establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
• Traffic Increase: With effective content, marketers can drive traffic to their website from different sources. Moreover, publishing content on social media platforms can help generate more followers, convert them into leads, and further into customers and active promoters of your company.     

How to implement a successful content marketing strategy?   

Implementing a content marketing strategy can be challenging. Here are a few steps involved in building an effective strategy:

• Specify the key challenges that your content strategy will solve and their relationship with business metrics 
• Include targeted buyer personas and understand the content gaps
• Determine your plan for publishing and maintaining the quality of your content

Considering the above-mentioned steps, you can create an effective content marketing strategy to enhance your business reach.  

The Evolution of Web Application Development

The web development world is constantly evolving. From basic, single page websites, it has grown to complex, responsive, and interactive websites and web applications. As the look and feel of web applications have changed over the years, entrepreneurs are making the best use of web applications to get a better online visibility and target their customers and prospects.

Apart from advanced features, ability to customize their own web application and complete transparency of the development process is what businesses are demanding. Earlier, people enjoying a few pages with basic fonts and simple graphical features, now want graphically rich websites that are well categorized and easily navigable across various devices. 

 

Image Credit: qwaygroups.com

Let’s look at what major factors are driving the change in the current web applications:

1. Security Takes Centre Stage: Earlier, security issues were usually neglected, as emphasis was laid more on the productivity of the web application. However, now new web applications are designed with inbuilt security features. Also, with custom web app development, companies are able to get security features added as per their requirements during the development phase.

2. A Variety in Tech Devices: As web applications in the past were built for personal computers, developers never had to face any real challenge with designing the interface. But, nowadays, with the availability of multiple tech devices such as tablets, smartphones, etc. developing a website application has become a little complicated. This is compelling web design professionals to transform their development approach.

3. Demand for Single Page App Usage: Earlier, a website consisted of multiple pages linked together that lead to slow page loading and frustrated users navigating on mobile devices. However, nowadays, web application development methods have been completely transformed, as web apps are now developed on a single page with infinite scroll. Developers are following this approach with an aim to provide fluid experience to users.

The pace at which the number of smart devices and features these devices have are increasing, web application development methods are expected to evolve even more rapidly. 

3 Mistakes to Avoid When Deploying BI Tools

Business Intelligence is gaining tremendous popularity among organizations. It simply describes a set of methodologies that businesses use in order to convert raw data into useful information for better decision making. However, with a rise in the number of BI solutions, the probability of companies choosing wrong BI software for their business problems has also grown. So, in order to make the most of their BI investment, companies should avoid making mistakes while investing in BI software.

Here are a few mistakes to avoid when deploying BI tools:

1. Having a Lack of Business Knowledge: Projects that completely rely on a single BI tool are doomed to fail. No single tool is bound to solve all business problems. So, when selecting a BI tool, companies should first understand

• Business problems that they are trying to solve
• Goals they are trying to attain
• BI tool they should use

2. Failing to Bring Everyone On Board: BI tools tend to fail most of the time because employees are completely clueless on how to use these tools. So, before buying any business intelligence tool, organizations should take each employee on board and

• Address their concerns and queries about the BI tool
• Show them how it will benefit the company and employees

3. Providing Insufficient Training: BI software is a complex structure that has lots of functionality in it. However, many businesses exhaust their entire BI budgets on either a few weeks’ training or software licenses. They fail to understand that it requires a lot of training to understand, how the software works. To avoid such mistakes, businesses should look for new ideas such as

• Providing expert training in a slow and systematic way
• Looking for someone technically trained who can explain software’s usage clearly
• Scheduling training sessions in small units for better understanding

A reliable business intelligence consultant can help businesses avoid these mistakes, set up new BI software, ameliorate existing systems, and make strategic decisions.