Chris Bland

About Chris Bland

Chris started Monkey Media in 2012 by accident when he was supposed to be taking a holiday. Prior to that he had launched six successful magazines, as well as couple of unsuccessful ones, and lived through the most tumultuous decade in the history of publishing by learning to adapt. He has helped hundreds of business-to-business companies improve their marketing and reach further into niche markets, and won’t rest until he has helped hundreds more. Chris has previously served on the board of Publishers Australia.

How to maximise ROI in your B2B marketing

As a business owner or marketer, you want to ensure that your marketing efforts yield a positive return on investment (ROI). In B2B marketing, it’s especially important to be strategic and focused in order to maximise the ROI from your marketing efforts. In this blog post, we’re looking at tips to help you get the most out of your marketing efforts. Identifying your goals The first step in maximising your ROI is to identify your goals. What are you looking to achieve through your marketing efforts? Are you looking to build brand awareness, educate your audience, or generate leads? It’s important to have a clear understanding of what you want to accomplish, so that you can select the right marketing tactics and measure success accordingly. Once you’ve identified your goals, the next step is to ensure that your marketing campaign and measurement methods align with [...]

Did ChatGPT just kill content marketing?

The rise of ChatGPT has led many to question the future of content marketing – and more specifically, how the content that fuels a content marketing strategy is created. With the ability to generate high-quality content quickly and at scale, is there even a place for human-generated content anymore? In this blog post, we’ll explore this question and provide insight into the future of content marketing in 2023. The advantages of AI-generated content It’s true that AI language models like ChatGPT can generate high-quality content that rivals or even surpasses the quality of content generated by SEO agencies or offshore writers. This is due to the advanced algorithms and vast amounts of data that these models are trained on. However, this doesn’t mean that content marketing as we know it is dead. In fact, relying solely on AI-generated content could actually be the kiss of [...]

Using funnels and automation to enhance your marketing

In an increasingly competitive and unpredictable world, it’s no longer enough to rely on word-of-mouth, luck and randomness for your business growth. Instead, savvy B2B companies of all sizes are increasingly making use of tools like marketing automation to improve the reliability and predictability of their sales pipeline. Too often, less experienced companies will dabble with different elements of marketing, whether that be working with an agency that specialises in some areas, or focusing on internal pet projects. Sometimes there can be a fixation on just Google Ads, or SEO, or social media, or events – that is, a focus on just one or some parts of the funnel, rather than putting together the big picture. By mapping out their marketing and sales process, B2B companies can tweak and improve various stages, automating elements where possible and overall ensuring they can measure and improve the [...]

B2B versus B2C funnels – what’s the difference?

If you’re selling low-price, high volume products via the web, it’s relatively straightforward to set up and measure a marketing funnel – you can directly track leads through to the point of sale and work out where your customers are coming from. But the B2B sales process can often take many months, and involve many touchpoints and decision makers. Here we look at the best way to set up and measure an effective B2B marketing funnel, tracking leads from when they are first gathered through to when they become customers. If your sales process is longer and more drawn-out, like in the world of B2B sales, your marketing funnel needs to match this speed as well - meaning it can take a longer time from a lead being generated to that account becoming a customer - and there needs to be intermediate stages along the [...]

Debunking common content marketing myths

A few years ago, content marketing was all the rage. While some of the buzz has died down, smart companies in the B2B space continue to use content very effectively, but many others can still get it very wrong. The sheer volume of low-value content out there may have given the concept a bad name, but it creates a better opportunity than ever before to stand out by doing things well. Here we look at what to do and what not to do. What is content anyway? When we talk about content, we mean any information that is valued by the person reading it. Whether it’s blogs and articles, or whitepapers, or graphics, or video – it’s information that goes beyond just getting your sales pitch across, and is something that people would be interested in reading or watching, whether or not they’re immediately planning [...]

Audience targeting for B2B Marketing

All marketing campaigns depend on reaching the right people. This is doubly important for niche and business-to-business (B2B) marketing campaigns, where there is little value in a broad-based campaign reaching the general public. Instead it all comes down to being seen by the right people and ensuring they hear the right message. Identify your audience Generally a business-to-business campaign is going to be based around things like industry sectors, company types, job roles, or even targeting specific companies and accounts. So any marketing option you choose should ideally either allow you to segment in this way, or provide reliable data on how these segments are being reached. Quality not quantity Avoid being lured into mass-market options that promise large numbers. Reaching fewer people, but people who are actually your target audience, is far more valuable than advertising to a huge number of people who have [...]

Top 5 ways to reach niche trade customers (apart from industry events)

Now that live events are back, business-to-business (B2B) suppliers are making the most of the opportunity to connect face to face with their customers in niche sectors like water, rail, energy, intelligent transport systems, local government and more. But what about keeping in touch between events, or reaching those key decision makers that didn’t make it to the event? Here we look at five of the best ways to do this. 1. Content Marketing B2B buyers are open to new technologies and better ways of doing things, but they are often also cautious – they need to understand the solution and, on top of that, they also like to see where else it has been used. Creating content is a great way to educate the market about your offering and increase their level of comfort and understanding. Content doesn’t just mean written content either – [...]

What is best: advertising, social media or managing your own marketing?

There are so many different places to spend your marketing budget, it can be hard to know what’s best. From advertising and magazines, to paid social media and Google Ads, to using your in-house people to create organic campaigns – which options get the best results for companies dealing in the business-to-business and business-to-government space? B2B marketing is different to consumer marketing. Everyone is pushing a different solution, so which should you choose? Some of the main pros and cons of these approaches are: Pros and cons What is clear is there is no single silver bullet for B2B marketing. The simple truth is that there are no easy answers. You need a combination. All approaches have both pros and cons, and the smartest marketers create an integrated approach that makes the most of the pros of all approaches. Goals, Audience, Content First, you need [...]

Avoiding common pitfalls with B2B lead generation

Everyone wants to generate leads right? It’s one of the most trackable forms of marketing activity, and the end result is you get actual contact details of people who want to hear from you. What’s not to love?  The benefits are obvious, and when you need to measure ROI, there are few clearer or better ways to do this than to have directly actionable leads. Lead generation is definitely a powerful and worthwhile goal in any marketing campaign, but it may not be the only goal. It’s important to understand what you can and can’t achieve with lead generation - and to make sure your approach is suited to your particular industry and niche. Are you ready? ‘Generating leads’ can often be a reflexive response to the question, ‘What do you want to achieve with your campaign?’, but it’s not always the only or best [...]

The surprising benefits of virtual events

Companies are increasingly using virtual events, not as a replacement for live events, but as one of the most engaging forms of digital marketing. They may still attend and exhibit at industry events when they can, but they can also get an impressive ROI and reach people they never normally would, by hosting their own virtual events. A virtual event can have a number of advantages over a live event: They are far more cost-effective – when you factor in not just direct-costs, but also freight, travel and time out of the office, live events are a massive drain on resources Virtual events are also far lower risk, as uncertainty continues, an online event is less likely to be blown out of the water by a sudden lockdown You can reach a far wider audience than would normally attend a live event, whether you’re chasing [...]