Smart Marketing Blog

8 Tips and Tricks to B2B Webinar Success

Updated 06.16.2020 with current research Webinars tend to be seen as difficult, time-consuming, and requiring specific expertise to pull off. The barriers to entry seem daunting, and it can be difficult to convince management and your company’s technical experts to participate. However, not only are webinars easier to organize and host than they appear, but they also can result in huge marketing and sales successes by generating new, engaged leads and opportunities.

Q&A from Webinar: Getting Started with Content Marketing, Year One

Thank you to all who joined our recent webinar: Getting Started with Content Marketing, Year One. Over 150 marketing and engineering professionals registered to learn how to better reach technical audiences, underscoring the importance of creating content to engage and attract new prospective buyers of your products and services.

Engage More, Stand Out with Sales Videos

Video is an interesting, memorable and inexpensive way for salespeople to personalize and humanize their messages, particularly for companies conducting some or all of their sales processes by phone or online. It can also have a profound effect on your connect success rate. One study I ran across found a 5X increase in email open rate and 8X increase in click-through rate for companies that incorporated videos into their sales processes.

Live Webinar: Getting Started with Content Marketing, Year One

Content is the fuel that powers your marketing plan and takes you toward your goals. The B2B buyer’s journey has transformed, especially for technical and engineering companies. In today’s world, consumers are constantly searching for information, testimonials, and examples of products and services that make their projects better, faster, and cheaper. Nearly all engineers prefer to do online research and evaluate vendors before talking to sales.  The majority of engineers are more likely to do business with a company that regularly produces new and current content over one that does not. Content is THE deciding factor.

Social Media Template Design: The Importance of Visual Imagery

In the first post of our social media blog series, we discussed common questions we get about social media. Today, we'll discuss how important visual imagery is to a successful social media program. It's pretty common knowledge that social media posts with images or video generate more impressions and clicks than posts without imagery do. To maximize your social media efforts, it’s imperative that you find or create images for every post you share.

10 Keys to Success as a Technical Marketing Manager

To be a successful technical marketing manager, you must understand how to apply marketing best practices in the context of a nuanced technical audience.  If you’ve hired a technical marketing manager, pass along this information to help your new staff member understand the breadth and depth of technical marketing. Or, if you’ve just been hired as a new technical marketing manager, congratulations! Here's a jumpstart to your job: research from hundreds of engineers that shows how they search for information and how they want to interact with marketing and sales. These 10 keys – which focus on brand, positioning, website plans, content marketing strategy, and awareness and loyalty campaigns – will strengthen the skills and knowledge you need to be a successful marketing manager in a technical, B2B company:

Top 5 Questions We Hear About Social Media

Many B2B technical companies are lost when it comes to social media. While engineers understand how to use their personal social media accounts, they often don't know how to use social media to boost web visits and leads. 

Create a Visual Brand with Your Corporate Pitch Deck

Your visual brand consists of the design elements that communicate your company’s values and personality. The design of every piece of content you produce conveys something about your brand at first glance, before a prospect reads a single word.

B2B Email Marketing Best Practices for the New Decade

Last week, we kicked off our blog series covering email for B2B technical companies with an overview of email marketing and why it is still a viable and valuable marketing tactic. Today, we’re looking at the best practices of B2B email marketing. (Miss post one of the series? Read it here: Is B2B Email Dead?)

Four Best Practices for Creating Effective Presentations

The marketing priority for small- to medium-sized B2B companies should always be to ensure they are utilizing the web and its global reach before all else. Yet the ultimate goal is to generate leads, create opportunities to engage the customer, and ultimately close the sale. Often this requires face-to-face meetings, product demonstrations, and targeted presentations. In order for your company to really shine at these prospect meetings, you need to be armed with a polished presentation that builds credibility, shows your experience, and conveys a memorable message that doesn't put people to sleep.