Content marketing

What is a Fat Funnel? Your guide to the marketing concept sweeping the B2B world

The leading B2B companies in Australia are all focusing on their fat funnels – a unique approach that is essential for any company focused on selling complex, high value products with long sales cycles.

Keeping content original in the age of generative AI

ChatGPT has made it possible to create readable, usually accurate content in seconds, potentially opening the floodgates for companies to create huge volumes of content. But if everyone is doing it, then it stops being a way to stand out. There’s already more content being created than humans will ever have the time to read, so pretty soon the SEO bots will stop rating this sort of content as well.

Aligning your marketing with your goals

When you’re starting any marketing campaign, it’s really important to clearly define your goals first. This is the single best way to ensure you get the results you want. One of the most common mistakes we see is people getting it backwards. They start by choosing the platform or the content type, and come to us saying “We need to do Google Ads!” or “We need to improve our SEO!” without much thought behind the message or the “why”. When there’s a mis-match between your goals and the marketing platform or action you choose, you are less likely to get the results you want. What are your goals?  Instead, start with your purpose. What results do you hope to get? Look ahead to the end of the campaign – what will make it worthwhile for you? Usually it’s going to be an increase in your [...]

How are AI tools like ChatGPT changing B2B marketing?

Do we really need another article on the impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) on marketing? There’s plenty of talk out there, a lot of it probably generated by ChatGPT, but I want to take a practical and specific look at how AI is impacting business-to-business marketing, particularly in the niche and trade industries that we operate in. ChatGPT has only been around for six months, and it may not have changed the world completely, but generative AI is certainly a game-changing tool. We’ve come across some companies who are actively using it in their day-to-day operations, others dipping their toes into the water, and plenty who still aren’t actually sure what it even is. I guess I should get some definitions clear first. Artificial intelligence (AI) itself is very broad, but at its simplest, it’s about getting machines to do anything which a human mind [...]

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 [...]

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 – [...]

4 ways B2B marketing is different to consumer marketing 

So your cousin has had a lot of success marketing his plumbing business on Facebook. Should you follow suit and invest in some Facebook marketing too? There’s so much advice out there on marketing nobody can take it all in. To make matters worse, most of it is based around consumer and mass marketing. But the fact is, if you’re in business-to-business and trying to reach a specific niche, then a lot of this advice doesn’t apply. The key is understanding what does still work, and throwing out the rest. Firstly, a quick definition, we are talking about business-to-business (B2B) marketing – marketing where you are selling to other businesses (including government organisations) rather than individuals. 1. Different demographics When marketers are targeting the consumer market, they often base their campaigns on traditional demographics like age, gender and income level – and Facebook is excellent [...]