The Search & Social Blog From Amplify Interactive

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The focus of today’s B2B & Inbound marketing  roundup is content marketing. I’ve rounded up a few recent B2B content marketing studies, tips & tricks and infographics. I KNOW I missed something – comment with your link to something recent for B2B content marketing.

B2B Content Marketing Stats & Charts

2013 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends

This study by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs highlights features about 20 slides of stats via Slideshare. Highlights include tactics used by B2B content marketers, the effectiveness of various content marketing tactics, social media sites used by B2B content marketers to distribute content (LinkedIn took the lead this year), challenges facing B2B content marketers (guess what? the biggest challenge is in creating content. I’ve got some tips for you below), and more.

12 Revealing Charts to Help You Benchmark Your Business Blogging Performance

This study from Hubspot features a lot of excellent charts that basically show how blogging has a direct impact on traffic and leads. Since blogs are usually where MOST B2B companies center their content marketing efforts, this study has some really nice numbers to support how much blogging it takes and how long it should take to really start seeing the results of your content efforts. Spoiler: for most B2B companies – it takes at LEAST 15 posts a month and 150+ posts before you really start seeing a return. 

B2B Content Marketing Tips & Tricks

As the study I referenced above points out – the biggest challenge facing content marketers is creating content. This post features a handy list of ideas for creating content. My favorite? There are a lot of tips for creating content where you barely even have to do any writing! Check it out.

This post directly addresses the study I pointed out above and focuses in on the stat that “64 percent of B2B content marketers say they are challenged with producing enough content”. So – this post breaks down how much content is enough with a simple math equation, and how to pull together the time and components to create enough content.

Might as well throw a platform-specific tip into the roundup. As you’ll see in the benchmark study from the section above, SlideShare is less noisy than some of the other channels, but it’s a perfect place for B2B marketers. The tips here are excellent. Interesting note – turns out long presentations (60+ slides) tend to do quite well on SlideShare. That’s pretty different from other sites…

B2B Content Marketing Infographics

Why Content Marketing is the New Branding

Sweet infographic on the various types of content formats from social media to infographics to whitepapers to interactive games and the ease of implementation vs value.

Content Plays a Critical Role Throughout Tech Buying Cycle

There’s a nice infographic in the middle of this post that breaks down the types of content that your target customers are looking for at various phases of the buying cycle. For example – “how to” content is great at the top of the funnel whereas demo’s, case studies and tools are better at the bottom of the funnel.

10 Useful B2B Marketing Infographics

That’s right, I’m putting a roundup in my roundup. That’s like a double bonus! The infographics included are:

1. How Social is B2B? (InsideView)
2. Is Content Marketing Traditional Advertising’s New Rival? (Marketo)
3. B2B Social Marketing Universe (Marketo)
4. Six Steps to Inbound Marketing Success (Impact BND)
5. B2B Marketing: LinkedIn vs. Facebook (BopDesign)
6. The Content Marketing Explosion (Blue Glass)
7. What Works for Social Sharing. B2B vs. B2C (Compendium)
8. The Business Marketers’ Guide to Instagram (Marketo)
9. The B2B Customer Reference Funnel (TechValidate)
10. The B2B Lead Generation Manifesto (Unbounce)

Ben’s Tips for Better Living

• Eating and Drinking: I went to Kansas this last weekend – my first ever visit to the midwest. Our first stop upon landing in Kansas City was to eat at Oklahoma Joe’s BBQ. 4.5 well deserved stars on Yelp. Then I proceeded to eat a lot more beef brisket and other types of BBQ over the next four days. Nothing quite lived up to Oklahoma Joe’s though.
• Favorite Distraction: Check out these photographs of dogs underwater 
• The Rawk: You might not know that I like to rock.
  • The new Sword record came out. Not quite as hook-tastic as the first 3 but solid nonetheless
  • Since my last update I’ve been to the following shows: The Deftones, Local H and Red Fang. All were completely solid. I’m heading out to see Helmet tonight.

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That wraps up this edition. Since you made it this far, you might as well follow Amplify Interactive on LinkedIn.

Amplify Interactive provides search engine & social media marketing services for a wide range of B2B clients. Check out our SEM services and our clients or download one of our SEM whitepapers.