The Great Content Marketing Reframe Welcome to "The Great Content Marketing Reframe" - a comprehensive report by PaperplaneCo that transcends surface-level tech trends and delves into the fundamental shifts reshaping B2B marketing in 2024. In our report, we propose that true innovation in B2B marketing lies in nurturing a new mindset. This report guides you...
Advancements in technology and organizational methods have changed the way B2B sales and marketing teams engage with potential customers. Innovations like account-based marketing, buyer intent signals, and AI provide exceptional insights into buyer behavior. However, these tools still cannot fully penetrate the intricacies of the B2B buying experience. The latter involves buying teams making often…
The latest predictions by Forrester highlight the rising expectations of business buyers, the disruption of digital buying, and evolving partner ecosystems, all contributing to increased costs in winning and protecting revenue. B2B organizations will need to align their marketing, sales, and product teams around customer-obsessed strategies to deliver value to buyers. Generative AI’s Role…
Video marketing has become a significant tool for B2B marketers, as indicated in recent research by the Content Marketing Institute. The medium’s storytelling and emotional resonance capabilities are the primary reasons for its widespread use. In the past year, 67% of marketers have found video increasingly crucial for their business, with 32% maintaining its consistent…
In B2B marketing, a hidden issue is causing significant problems – the overuse of industry jargon. This overreliance on specialized language is leading to unclear messaging, negatively impacting customer relationships and financial outcomes. Marketers are known for transforming ordinary concepts into compelling stories. However, their dependence on jargon is creating communication barriers, alienating potential customers….
Trust in B2B marketers is pivotal, yet there’s potential for growth, as highlighted by the Informa Tech 2023 Trust in Marketing Index. A critical area identified for improvement is the value derived from gated content. A significant 71% of decision-makers express disappointment in the value of such content, with 23% often and 48% sometimes feeling…
The digital revolution in marketing brought about unparalleled growth in both its reach and financial power. With the introduction of new channels and technologies, investments surged. However, the pandemic introduced a phase of budgetary stagnation, compelling CMOs to reconsider spending on once-indispensable areas like marketing technology. Gartner’s annual CMO Spend and Strategy Survey, which encompasses…
In B2B marketing, it often feels like digital channels dominate. Just a couple of years ago, we were all debating whether in-person events would ever fully recover after the pandemic. However, in 2023, it's increasingly clear that in-person events are not only relevant again—they’re indispensable for making connections and elevating B2B conversations. Let’s explore where...
In the fast-moving business world, thought leadership has become a guiding light, keeping brands in the spotlight, building credibility and leading the way through the sales funnel. And thought leadership is exciting! It’s where insights, expertise, and new ideas come together to create content that resonates, helps others, and sparks innovation. In the B2B landscape,...
The 2023 State of Marketing to Engineers Report was designed to help companies better understand the information needs of technical buyers and provide insights on how marketing to them should be done. Engineers scan through at least five pages of search engine results before finding what they need, with just 4% of them staying on...
Marketers must make wise choices in adverse times, but doing so involves careful analysis of past data and the use of tactics that have proven successful over time. Let’s delve into some options that marketers have at their disposal to go through the looming recession and come out stronger. The 95:5 rule of B2B marketing,...
The average B2B customer journey takes 192 days, dropping to 70 days when the first contact point is a review site. Social media is used primarily by customers who are not in-market and who need more time to close a deal. A new report by the revenue-attribution software provider Dreamdata shares several B2B go-to-market benchmarks...
The growing need for self-service features highlights the main disconnect between what buyers want and how sellers sell. Every technology vendor must adapt to the attitudes of today’s B2B customers. Their consumer expectations follow them to the workplace—they value their personal time and don’t have patience for redundant inconveniences. A recent report by the software...
A report shines some light on the type of, and way in which, video is used and created depending on one’s role within a company. Source: 2022 Vidyard State of Video Report Below are a few interesting insights from a new report by Vidyard and Demand Metric. We believe they are important for our readers...
B2B marketing channels are ranked from top earners to worst performing. The Best B2B Marketing Channels of 2022, Ranked One study compares the customer acquisition costs (CAC) and the return on investment (ROI) of 11 B2B marketing channels, based on data from 150+ B2B marketing projects spanning 30+ industries between 2017 and 2022. Speaking engagements...
CMOs’ budget allocations for 2022 show a big return to offline channels. Even though marketing budgets grew from 6.4% of company revenue in 2021 to 9.5% in 2022, they still haven’t gone back up to pre-pandemic levels (around 11%). Source: Gartner Research CMOs estimate that in 2022 their budgets will allocate 56% to online channels...
A new study reveals which issues create internal friction between sales and marketing. 82% of sales and marketing professionals working in the B2B space find the experience provided to their customers to be worse than excellent. The main drivers behind this are communication issues like differing or misaligned goals (41%), complex processes or workflows (36%),...
Various patterns emerge at the intersection between B2B content consumption and the buying journey. NetLine’s new report analysed how B2B buyers opted to share their first-party data as they registered for different content types at various stages of their purchase timeline (up to 3 months, 3-6 months, 6-12 months, or more than 1 year). The...
A new report looks at what B2B buyers pay attention to when it comes to content. According to Demand Gen Report’s Content Preferences Survey Report, the majority of B2B buyers typically consume 3–5 pieces of content before engaging with a salesperson when making a purchase decision. The most valuable content format for researching a B2B...
LinkedIn’s new think tank, The B2B Institute, published a large study to analyse the creativity and effectiveness of B2B marketing campaigns during the period between 2010 and 2021. “The B2B Effectiveness Code” is a white paper to help B2B brands create more effective marketing by better understanding the types of effects their advertising generates, and...
McKinsey’s most recent global B2B Pulse reveals that B2B companies have reached equilibrium in their omnichannel capabilities—just in time for customers to disrupt that balance again. New research by McKinsey found that customers expect omnichannel to offer more channels, more convenience, and a more personalised experience. And if they don’t get what they’re looking for,...
The advisory firm Convince & Convert partnered with B2B influencer marketplace MyOnalytica to publish a report on B2B influencer rates. Source: Onalytica Over the last 5+ years, the number of B2B Influencers has grown exponentially across sectors such as Tech, Financial Services, and Healthcare. The first-ever B2B Influencer Compensation Report Guide, reveals the current rates...
Adobe published its ‘2022 Digital Trends – B2B In Focus’ report based on a survey of 814 B2B executives working in the Technology and Manufacturing industries. Survey respondents agree that customer journeys have changed, and the move to digital has been very significant. They think this pace will persist for the foreseeable future. This...
Below are the key takeaways from the “12th Annual B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Insights 2022” report produced by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs. Source: Content marketing institute | B2B 2022 Research eBoook The pandemic prompted new strategies to capture audience attention. Many marketers shifted to digital marketing and online selling. In addition,...
B2B marketers suffer all too often from product delusion, whereas they should focus on what is much more important than the product—the brand. 77% of B2B ads score 1 on a 1-5 scale of creative effectiveness, according to the B2B Institute’s research with System1. For B2C, that number is 53%. That’s substantially better. Why are...
The B2B Institute at LinkedIn published a report titled “2030 B2B Trends”. The first trend addresses the increasing importance of brand building, the second explores creative strategies, and the third covers distribution. Trend 1: The War On Brand Over the past 10 years, the B2B marketing industry has become obsessed with the bottom-of-the-funnel. We invest...
A report by Gartner uncovered some eye-opening trends within the B2B buying process. Digital Trend 1: B2B customers rely on digital channels throughout the purchase journey (such as supplier websites, third-party websites, social media). There has been a shift from in-person sales interactions toward digital channels. B2B buyers report spending exceedingly little time with sales...
LinkedIn shares insights about Gen Zers based on a new survey and their behaviour on the platform. LinkedIn published a series of three blog posts on the Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012) exploring this audience’s high-level traits and attributes, habits and trends of Gen Zers on LinkedIn, and how brands are connecting...
Nowadays, it’s more important for brands to invite people to participate than to force a precise worldview on them. And it appears that B2B brands are better at it than the B2C field. We live in a people-powered world now. As they become ever more hyperconnected, people are turning to each other (rather than advertising)...
TikTok, with its untapped potential to reach entrepreneurs, is a medium that B2B advertisers seem to overlook and underutilise. But this is starting to change. With TikTok having recently hit 1B monthly active users, as a B2B marketer you might as well wonder whether it makes sense for you to get on the bandwagon. Social...
CB Insights’ newsletter is a blueprint on how to amuse a sometimes too serious business audience. If a tech mogul can make “Don’t be evil” their mantra, so can CB Insights make “Don’t be boring” theirs. The company’s newsletter became famous for doing everything differently, and—most importantly—fun. What began a decade ago as a bunch...
New research shows B2B marketers are missing opportunities by focusing on sales that will never happen, instead of targeting long-term goals. It might surprise you to learn that up to 95% of business clients are not in the market for many goods and services at any one time. This is a deceptively simple fact, but...