Smart Marketing Blog

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.

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.

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.