Smart Marketing Blog

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.

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.