The Kapost 50 spotlights the B2B marketing headliners who rocked it in 2015. But 15 minutes of fame this is not: from these brands’ rock-solid efforts, you can glean some of the major global marketing strategy trends that will dominate in 2016. Check them out, take note, and go ahead—sing along.
“The Walls Come Tumblin’ Down”
Breaking down the walls of historically siloed departments, databases, and channels continues to be one of the most revolutionary global B2B marketing strategy trends for 2016.
Take the venerable 208-year-old publishing company John Wiley and Sons. It embarked on a process and operations overhaul, paving the way for the company to merge and streamline traditionally disparate teams and contact databases. Wiley now has “several hundred marketers planning, creating, distributing, and optimizing global marketing initiatives under one digital roof”—from North America to Asia.
The key to success for global B2B marketing leaders starts in-house.
Meanwhile, technology software and consulting juggernaut IBM has the herculean task of ensuring that its critical marketing content reaches millions of customers worldwide. The key to success for this global leader, in fact, starts in-house. Hundreds of employees across seven sectors use a sharable, centralized calendar. These global teams all have visibility into the content lifecycle, allowing them to coordinate and strategize around customer-centric content.
“Come Together”
Data-platform company Workiva brought down walls and aligned key stakeholders by marrying a new buyer-centric content marketing strategy with the right technology. Workiva found a perfect partner in Kapost because “the solutions matched our strategy,” explained Workiva’s Erin Wall.
Developing content strategy in conjunction with implementing the Kapost software paid off for Workiva. Activities like identifying targeted personas for each content piece, integrating publishing channels, creating task workflows associated with each piece of content, and creating an editorial calendar of assets were baked right into the process. The content strategy rollout was smooth, quick, and boasted significant results within six months.
“Homeward Bound”
The leaders in global marketing strategy have also grasped the need to localize content for each region. Microsoft Dynamics’ story is an epic one of integrating content pillars across eleven markets in Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America.
While the far-flung marketing teams of this business solutions company collaborated closely on the myriad aspects of a behemoth campaign, they also gave meticulous attention to detail in order to tailor the assets to each region’s specific needs and culture.
Similarly, by coordinating marketing efforts across its teams in 2015, document-destruction company Shred-it was able to launch fresh, targeted content in eight markets. The marketing teams created, translated, and locally adopted 258 emails, 175 landing pages, and approximately 50 assets.
“Living in a Material World”
In addition to localizing campaigns, rock star marketers are finding other ways to create relevant and critical customer-centric content that drives results. Cloud IT firm Intermedia’s show-stopping performance of the year was its 2015 Insider Risk Report, which examined the data security habits of U.S. and U.K. office workers.
Other assets supporting the extensive report were commentary from internal and external subject matter experts, along with best practices for alleviating the problem. According to Kapost 50, these assets were distributed across channels to drum up publicity, drive new leads, nurture existing leads, create social buzz, and enable sales and channel partners to create selling opportunities.
The Blueprint of Modern Product Launch Marketing calls great content “the backbone of successful product launch marketing” because it “frames the larger problem your buyers are trying to solve, clearly and accurately explains your product and how it helps solve that problem, and enables your sales team to sell the product.”
And indeed, linking content marketing efforts to lead generation and sales is only gaining in importance and necessity.
For John Wiley and Sons, content marketing analytics is a top priority, with teams dedicated to measuring results and data tied to commerce, revenue, and conversions. And with the launch of a new worldwide campaign in 2015 in which Wiley’s global teams pulled together to co-brand assets and distribute content across channels, they also tracked engagement from lead acquisition to sales qualified lead (SQL).
Now these rock stars can boast $975,000 of campaign-generated SQL—and that is music to marketers’ ears.