Smart Marketing Blog

Case Study vs. White Paper: What’s the Difference?

Creating high quality, helpful content at a regular cadence is key to generating inbound leads for your technical business. Case studies and white papers are two of the most powerful and sought-after types of content by engineers, and both can help you generate technical leads for your business. But how do you decide on a white paper versus a case study, and what’s the difference?

Think Beyond the Funnel & Leverage the Flywheel

For years, sales and marketing teams have focused their time and efforts around a funnel that focuses on attracting prospects at the top and converting them through various phases until they become an output at the bottom.   

Content IS King - 5 Steps to Writing Effective White Papers

Compelling content is vital to your marketing efforts – engineers need and expect technical content such as white papers, data sheets, and detailed customer testimonials. These materials do much more than inform; through engaging content, you increase trust, strengthen perceived value and brand loyalty, gain a higher click-through rate for content placed on your website, and ultimately generate new leads and sales.

3 Steps to Calculate Your Leads-to-Revenue Ratio

Do you want to know how many web visits and leads you need to meet your revenue goals? Follow these three steps to create the math model for your lead generation strategy.

The Importance of Content in the Digital World

In today’s digital world, creating content should be a top goal in order to increase more inbound traffic to your website and become a trusted advisor. Start by identifying a handful of employees who could provide quality blog content and then start out at two per month if you are new to blogging. To make sure to stay on top of the craft, block out an hour on your calendar each month to dedicate to writing your post. From there, move to bi-weekly posts and then weekly. Creating a steady content stream doesn’t happen overnight, but the more effort you put in toward it, the greater your return will be. Over time, your content will become better crafted and more educational, making your site the go-to place for relevant knowledge within your industry. Let’s dig into the top reasons content remains so important.

Want to Market Against Your Competitors? Proceed Carefully

Remember when you were young, and there was that kid who spent more time dissing you or others than making something of themselves? Maybe you wanted to let them have it, but you knew (or maybe your parents gave you some advice) that it was best to take the high road and focus on your strengths and success.

Stop Interrupting and Selling, Start Educating and Supporting

Marketing and selling in the B2B engineering and technical space used to require exhibiting at trade shows and placing print ads in trade journals or technical publications. But engineers and technical buyers now prefer to start their product or service evaluation online instead of at events as they did in the past. More and more, these buyers want to be educated vs. sold to in the traditional sense. 

New Marketing Equation from INBOUND 2019

Delight Your Customers + Remove Friction = Grow Better More than 26,000 attendees joined HubSpot at its annual marketing mecca, INBOUND 2019. If you didn’t make it to Boston and are curious about the latest and greatest HubSpot platform updates, no worries, we’ve got you covered. 

2019 Trends in Industrial Marketing: Content, Inbound & ROI

IEEE GlobalSpec, a provider of data-driven industrial marketing solutions designed to help companies promote their products and grow their businesses, recently released its annual Trends in Industrial Marketing survey. The survey found that industrial marketers' most common challenges include:

Key Considerations for Adding CAD to Your B2B Content Marketing Program

Having diverse content types to attract and engage your personas through their buyer’s journey is key to the success of any B2B content marketing program. In this blog, we provide an overview of CAD content marketing and key considerations for determining if it can fit into your content marketing plan.