My journey to define big data, big content and why are they important when it comes to B2B lead generation.

Businesses are always looking for innovative ways to gain more traffic and customers online. Tactics range from the now nefarious keyword stuffing to the well-worn buzzword of 2013, ‘content marketing’. Most businesses understand the importance of content. Or should I say, they understand the long-standing phenomenon of creating material for people to consume now known as ‘content marketing’.

Ad-hoc marketing is great if you need to fill a gap in your marketing timeline but let’s be clear, ad-hoc marketing is not a lead generation model which will drive business results or success, rather the opposite.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock these past few years, you know that lead generation is now more than just buying lists and cold calling. Inbound marketing and new technology have breathed new life into lead generation, giving us access to a variety of tools at our fingertips. Despite this, success in generating qualified leads is not dependent on using these tools.

Are you at a fork in the road contemplating a marketing automation tool? Are you worried about losing the personal touch with your valued customers and prospects with marketing automation? No need to furrow that brow of yours! Marketing automation has flourished on the premise of helping marketers deliver automated, yet personalised communication.

Your marketers are typically capable of producing good marketing material. From website content, blog articles, social media updates, online advertisements to emails, surveys, newsletters, brochures and eBooks. As a business owner you review the material and most of the time you’re happy with what they’ve produced. It is well designed, it has your brand name and logo, it describes your product / brand clearly and it is interesting. You believe your company has produced a great piece of marketing material. But there’s one problem: this material might not be good enough for your buyers.

Down with Comic Sans! Death to neon text! Some aesthetic web features have become so widely reviled by developers and designers that they have reached the public conscious. People often claim they feel digitally ill over a certain typeface or colour palette but, while many people know which websites they like and which they don’t, few would be able to successfully identify the features that make their favourite sites likeable.

Many blogs out there give you lists of top content marketing mistakes to avoid while executing your B2B content marketing. In this blog we’re going to look a bit deeper from a more strategic perspective and also alert you to what mistakes you should avoid while creating your content marketing strategy.  

Being a business owner, you may have a b2b marketing team or a b2b marketing professional responsible for handling all marketing tasks in your business. You allocate a certain proportion of your company-wide budget for marketing, review a new digital marketing campaign proposed by the team and give them the go ahead. Soon they ask you for more funding to develop a different campaign, to support the existing campaign or for a different product / service altogether. 

“The time has come when advertising has in some hands reached the status of a science. It is based on fixed principles and is reasonably exact. The causes and effects have been analysed until they are well understood. The correct methods of procedure have been proved and established. We know what is most effective and we act on basic law.“