How B2B Buyer Behavior Has Changed in Light of COVID-19, and What Marketers and Sellers Can Do Now
82 percent of B2B buyers said they were concerned or strongly concerned about the possibility of a pandemic-sparked recession, while 30 percent have reported spending more on videoconferencing software — two of several findings of interest to digital marketers in a recently-released survey examining B2B buyer shifts. eMarketer

How Bad Data Hurts B2B Companies [Infographic]
Just 33 percent of marketers say they can rely on their customer relationship management (CRM) software, and 88 percent said that bad data has a direct impact on their company's bottom line — two of the findings in a new infographic look at the effect of poor data on B2B firms. MarketingProfs

The Evolving Discussion Around COVID-19 and How Brands Have Responded [Infographic]
Brands have used Twitter the most often to mention the global health crisis, according to recently-released survey data examining how brands are using social media in crisis management planning. Social Media Today

Social Media Users Value Brands Responsive To COVID-19 Crisis
83% of social media users expect brands to address the health crisis in their ads, with 31 percent saying they appreciate brands offering products suited for remote work, 28 percent promoting social distancing, and 24 percent mentioning brand philanthropic efforts, according to newly-released survey data of interest to marketers. MediaPost

Why It Takes So Long to Apply Data-Driven Insights to Campaigns
Just 5 percent of marketers say they can immediately go from data gathering to actionable intelligence, while 31 do so later than they would like, and some 3 percent take so long that the output is irrelevant, according to new survey data. MarketingProfs

Instagram Live Streams Can Now Be Viewed on the Web
Facebook-owned Instagram has made it possible for its users to view its previously app-only Instagram Live video streams from its website, bringing marketers a new cross-promotion opportunity with the feature, the firm recently announed. Social Media Today

Twitter notifies users that it’s now sharing more data with advertisers
Twitter has notified its users that a previously available user privacy ad interaction sharing option has been shuttered for all, in a move that will bring more audience data to advertisers, the firm recently announced. The Verge

What Customers Need to Hear from You During the COVID Crisis
The types of brand stories companies should be telling their customers include those that put solutions before sales, according to a new examination by Harvard Business School of interest to B2B marketers. Harvard Business School

Facebook Has Launched a New Tournaments Option for People to Create Their Own Gaming Events
With online gaming forecast to produce $196 billion by 2022, a recent move by social giant Facebook allowing its users to create their own private or public gaming events could bring brands new opportunities for reaching its sizable gaming audience. Social Media Today

Content Plays Various Roles in Brands’ Customer Engagement Strategies
61 percent of marketing leaders said that interactive branded content communicates brand promise and value, according to recently-released survey data from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, with 51 percent saying that it delivers thought-leadership, and 45 percent saying that interactive content helps communicate with customers, partners and prospects. MarketingCharts

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE:

A lighthearted look at digital transformation and organizational change by Marketoonist Tom Fishburne — Marketoonist

Grinning Tim Cook Announces New iPhone Will No Longer Be Compatible With AirPods — The Onion

TOPRANK MARKETING & CLIENTS IN THE NEWS:

• Lee Odden — Leadership and Engagement In a Time of Crisis [Podcast] — Traject
• Amie Krone — Navigating the new world of working at home — Chaska Herald
• Dell, SAP — Building A Perfect B2B Influencer Program During Imperfect Times — Forbes
• Lee Odden — Marketing During a Pandemic – Resources for Small Businesses in the Coronavirus Crisis [Roundup] — Simple Machines

Do you have your own top B2B content marketing or digital advertising stories from the past week? Please let us know in the comments below.

Thanks for taking the time to join us, and we hope that you'll return again next Friday for more of the most relevant B2B and digital marketing industry news. In the meantime, you can follow us at @toprank on Twitter for even more timely daily news. Also, don't miss the full video summary on our TopRank Marketing TV YouTube Channel.

The post Digital Marketing News: Shifting B2B Buyer Behaviors, Brands Evolve Crisis Response, Bad Data’s Effect on B2B Firms, & Twitter Shares New Data With Advertisers appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

Marketers are in the business of attracting attention. All of our tactics, our strategies, our goals boil down to: Did we get someone’s attention and inspire them to take action?

The key to modern marketing is that we have to earn that attention. There will always be someone on who is louder, funnier, more talented, or just less shameless than your brand is willing to be. The only way to truly capture and sustain someone’s focus is to earn the right to their time. 

How do you earn attention? By providing remarkable experiences. By showing you care about your audience, you know who they are, and that your brand is here to help and to entertain them. 

For our latest Break Free video, we talked to a marketer who is helping marketers offer more memorable experiences. Sruthi Kumar is the Senior Marketing Manager at Sendoso, a platform that coordinates direct mail and gifting campaigns for personalization at scale.

Sruthi and I sat down to talk about experiential marketing in all its forms: Event marketing, direct mail, content and beyond. We also dig deeper into the philosophy of marketing. Should marketers specialize in a certain aspect of marketing, or should we be taking a more holistic approach? Can left-brained content folks and right-brained strategy folks get along… and really, is it that simple of a divide? Sruthi has some inspiring thoughts on all of the above.

Oh, and along the way, Sruthi shares how she built a marketing department from the ground up, taking Sendoso from a small start-up to competing with the big brands.

 [bctt tweet="I think what we’re really trying to do is bridge that online and offline experience. @sruthikkumar" username="toprank"]

Highlights:

1:00: Direct mail plus digital marketing for unforgettable experiences

5:45: Marketing to delight your audience

7:40: Building a marketing department from the ground up

11:05: Tactics for earning attention at marketing events

18:15: Marketing requires creative and analytical thinking 

Josh:

So tell me a little bit about Sendoso. What is it? What do you do?

Sruthi:

We're a sending platform, so we really help our customers reach their customers and prospects in a meaningful way by sending company swag, direct mail, sweets and treats, handwritten notes, the whole nine yards, in order to make really human connections with their prospects and customers.

Josh: 

Do you feel like this going back to a more simpler form of marketing compared to digital marketing? Do you feel like that’s more effective as our world gets more digital?

Sruthi:

So I actually think they go hand in hand. What we're trying to do is really bridge that online and offline experience. So not to say that digital marketing does not work. I'm a marketer. I run our field marketing team, we use digital heavily, but it's just about bringing all the channels together to create that seamless experience for the end user, and that person that you want to book a meeting with or have a signed contract with or whatever else you need from them.

[bctt tweet="It’s about bringing all the channels together to create that seamless experience for the end user, that person who you want to book a meeting with or have a signed contract with. @sruthikkumar" username="toprank"]

We are moving to an ABM approach when we are doing our events, because sometimes you get to large audiences and it's hard to really get in contact with anyone. The beautiful thing about our product is that anyone can use it in any vertical. It's direct mail: If you're selling, you can use it. If you're trying to reach an audience, you can use it. 

We do the double funnel approach at Sendoso. We do have demand gen tactics while we also have ABM tactics as well. 

I had an interview that was my first internship as a marketer. The CMO asked me, ‘Are you analytical? Or are you creative?’ And I was like, ‘I don't know, I feel like I'm a little bit of both.’ 

And she said, ‘You can't be both.’ And I just want to call her now, because you have to be both. I may not be the most analytical person on my team. But I get to work with this marketing ops manager. We built our team together, and she's very analytical. I get to learn from her and understand how would my MOPS person do this. And that's the cool stuff that you get to take with you. 

As a marketer, you should be well rounded — you're a content marketer, but you could put a demand gen campaign together.

Josh:

 We just love this binary of left brain versus right brain. But then you get this idea that oh, well, the creative types are just sitting up there in their beanbag chairs with the lava lamps going, ‘Oh, wouldn't it be cool if we did this?’ And then on the other hand is a bunch of robots who are crunching numbers. For some people, those things are going to overlap into a circle and some are somewhere on the continuum, but you can’t be just one or the other. 

[bctt tweet="People ask, 'Are you analytical or are you creative?' But you have to be both... As a marketer, you should be well rounded: You're a #contentmarketer, but you could put a demand gen campaign together. You're not just writing. @sruthikkumar" username="toprank"]

Sruthi:

With all those marketing activities that we're supposed to do, some people are just doing the check-boxes. That's totally fine, but I think you should bring your personality into it. I think so many of us are so scared. Like having our corporate voice, but I think our personal voice should be in there too. 

I think the only reason why Sendoso did stand out in the early days is because we got to incorporate so many of our early founders’ and members’ own personalities into the brand. And even the way we pitch our product today is by the voices of our sales team and our marketing team, our co-founders and c-suite. So I think it's just about being okay with being yourself and incorporating that into your whole corporate brand.

[bctt tweet="I think the reason Sendoso did stand out in the early days is we got to incorporate so many of our early founders’ own personalities. It's about being okay with being yourself and incorporating that into your corporate brand. @sruthikkumar" username="toprank"]

Stay tuned to the TopRank Marketing Blog and subscribe to our YouTube channel and podcast for more Break Free B2B interviews. Here are a few to whet your appetite:

• Break Free B2B Marketing: Gary Gerber on Scaling ABM without Losing Focus
• Break Free B2B Series: Hal Werner on the Intersection of Marketing Creativity and Analytics
• Break Free B2B Series: Adi Bachar-Reske on Taking the Lead in the Evolution of B2B Content Marketing

The post Break Free B2B Marketing: Sruthi Kumar on Creating Memorable Experiences appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

While their importance pales in comparison to many other things taken away by our society’s ongoing lockdown, I do find myself missing sports. Going without them during a difficult time causes me to appreciate the comfortable routine and reliable distraction they provide all the more.

Those who know me will not be surprised to learn that I’m longing for baseball especially — everything from strikeouts and singles to slides and steals. But there is no part of the game I miss more than home runs.

Home runs are among the most satisfying individual achievements in sports. When a batter goes deep, he takes care of everything, going from home plate to home plate and putting a run — or more — on the board single-handedly. It is the literal representation of “covering all your bases.”

via GIPHY

With baseball and many other cherished forms of entertainment amiss, content marketers can help fill the void by focusing on experiential content, which is characterized by its ability to pull in a user through immersive, interactive, impactful elements. These kinds of deeper digital experiences are also more valuable from an engagement and awareness standpoint, at a time where in-person events are off the table.

“Because people are figuring out how to thrive in an almost entirely online world, their expectations towards a brand's digital experience [are] also changing. It's no longer about clicks, downloads, and impressions,” writes Diginomica’s Barb Mosher Zinck in recapping Mark Bornstein’s chat from the Discover Martech Virtual Event last month. “It's about engagement. It's about experiential marketing.”

With this context in mind, how can marketers hit a home run with experiential content, covering all the bases for both their audience and their business?

Covering Every Base with Experiential Content

Reflecting the baseball diamond, I see four key aspects of knocking it out of the park with experiential content, at a time where doing so might be especially beneficial for marketers.

Base 1: Entertaining and Effective

The proverbial square one (or first base, in this case) is that experiential content needs to be compelling and engaging. If you aren’t getting someone’s attention and piquing their interest quickly with the content, you’re out before you’ve left the batter’s box.

Technology is always offering new ways to increase the allure of experiential content, including tools like virtual reality, augmented reality, feature integration, and interactive functionality. Small touches like the animations and clickable elements in TopRank Marketing’s Break Free of Boring B2B infographic, for example, can go a long way. The more you bring the user into the experience and make them feel like part of the story, the more successful your content will be.

It’s not just about the entertainment factor. That second word — effective — is equally important, if not more so. Your content should effect the person consuming it, be it emotionally or attitudinally. Ideally, the person consuming this experience will feel something, and come away thinking differently about its subject.

Once you accomplish this, you’re rounding first base and heading into second.

[bctt tweet="“If you aren’t getting someone’s attention and piquing their interest quickly with the content, you’re out before you’ve left the batter’s box.” @NickNelsonMN" username="toprank"]

Base 2: Educational and Informative

Most marketing content is designed to inform in some way, satisfying the curiosities of its audience while intertwining a distinct point of view. The experiential dynamic is particularly valuable for this purpose. As the old saying goes: “Show me and I’ll forget. Teach me and I may remember. Involve me and I’ll learn.”

AT&T is one example of a company that’s using emerging experiential technologies for employee training purposes, taking advantage of the heightened ability to make information stick. As you plan a content marketing initiative, think not just about ways to entertain your audience, but also ways to memorably imprint the messages and revelations you want them to take away.

By this point, you’re already halfway home.

Base 3: Collaborative and Orchestrated

Hey, there’s nothing wrong with a solo home run. But the feat is far more exciting when there are runners on base to drive in. Teamwork comes into play in multiple ways when it comes to maximizing the value of experiential content.

via GIPHY

First and foremost, your efforts should be strategically orchestrated throughout the organization. While marketing drives the bus, plenty of others ought to be riding along. By nature, experiential content is intended to address a nonlinear customer journey in which B2B buyers average 17 meaningful interactions on the way to completing a purchase (per SiriusDecisions). How do all those interactions come together around your experience in a consistent, unified, personalized way? How will you ensure that every customer-facing function is aligned?

Secondly, there is the importance of collaboration within the marketing department itself. Generally speaking, a great piece of experiential content is shaped by many different talents and skills: writers and strategists shaping the content, designers and artists bringing it to life visually, search and social specialists making it easily discoverable, etc.

And finally, there is the influencer aspect. While not always a fit, influencers can usually power up experiential content in profound ways:

• Adding unique insight and perspective from their expert point of view
• Bringing built-in credibility and trust with their own established audiences
• Amplifying promotion of the content through their own networks

One example of interactive influencer content in action can be found in the self-guided experience around AI and finance that TopRank Marketing put together with Prophix. The asset beat engagement benchmarks by 642%.

[bctt tweet="“Great experiential content is shaped by many different talents: writers and strategists shaping the content, designers and artists bringing it to life visually, search and social specialists making it easily discoverable.” @NickNelsonMN" username="toprank"]

Bringing It Home: Impactful for the Business

The three components above all focus on making experiential content valuable to the audience. This is a worthy point of emphasis, since strengthening relationships and building trust are essential objectives for modern brands, especially in our current climate.

But of course, investing the time and resources into creating a high-caliber content experience also needs to be justified by bottom-line business impact. The good news is that bringing users into the experience lends itself to driving action; for example, statistics show that interactive content generates twice the conversions of passive content.

At all comes back to the overarching strategy. What specific business results are you hoping to achieve? How will you facilitate them in a user-friendly way that nurtures trust and builds momentum in the customer journey? Which other tactics will support these goals?

It’s important to think about setting up positive outcomes beyond the direct conversion. A person interacting with your content may not be inclined to fill out a form at that moment, but if they remember the experience, and the way it altered their thinking, and it brings them into your marketing funnel weeks or months later, that’s a win. This reinforces the value of getting it right with items one and two on this list — effect and educate.

Make Your Experiential Content Campaign a Round-Tripper

We may not have sports, but we still have sports metaphors. I’ll keep seeing to that. And the home run serves as a perfectly fitting allegory for experiential content, which can produce so much value for a brand on its own, with one swing of the proverbial bat.

When you combine immersive entertainment with memorable learnings, collaborative clout, and measurable business impact, you’ve got yourself a marketing moonshot. All that’s left at that point is the bat flip.

via GIPHY

For more practical tips and guidance on this subject, I encourage you to check out Joshua Nite’s recap of the B2B Marketer’s Journey To Experiential Content presentation from B2B Marketing Exchange in February.

The post How to Hit a Marketing Home Run with Experiential Content appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

Tara Reade, the woman who alleges Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in 1993, said in a video interview on Thursday that he should withdraw from the White House race. Gloria Tso reports.

The sting of the Asian giant hornet can kill and that's not just an expression of speech. Since their discovery in 2019 in the US, traps have been set to see if Asian giant "murder hornets" have settled in the state. Libby Hogan has more.

Rival lawmakers scuffled in Hong Kong's legislature on Friday in a row over electing the chairman of a key committee, a fresh sign of rising political tension as the coronavirus pandemic tapers off in the Chinese-ruled city. Francesca Lynagh reports.

Aides to U.S. President Trump say their 2020 campaign will now be focus on two themes: Trump is the only candidate who can resurrect the economy and that Democrats will not be as tough on China, a country Trump is blaming for the pandemic.

It's only 'Rock and Roll,' but one of the world's preeminent museums likes it; New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art will display instruments from Chuck Berry, The Rolling Stones, Kurt Cobain, Lady Gaga and more until October 1. Rough Cut. (No Reporter Narration.)

When their home city, Seattle, reported its first fatalities from the coronavirus, Justin Ith and his team decided to create a new smartband, the Immutouch, which buzzes when the wearer’s hand goes near their face.

A town in southern Sweden has turned to a traditional source to try to prevent the coronavirus spreading during an annual festive event on Thursday: Chicken manure. Emer McCarthy reports.

Reuters Breakingviews examines how Washington’s new paradigm on China is affecting Silicon Valley, from overseas investments to intellectual property protection to trade.

Officials in India's capital imposed a special tax of 70% on retail liquor purchases from Tuesday, to deter large gatherings at stores as authorities ease a six-week lockdown imposed to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

The Bangladesh navy has rescued around 280 Rohingya Muslims from the Bay of Bengal, towing their stranded boat to an island where they will be quarantined as a precaution against the coronavirus, coast guard and naval officials said on Friday.

Afghanistan's Taliban insurgents killed a provincial police chief and two others in a roadside bomb attack, the local governor said on Friday, in the latest violence hindering a U.S.-brokered peace process.

Shell has raised the environmental stakes among major oil and gas producers with plans to dramatically reduce the carbon impact of its business.

One has been promoting environmental regulation for decades, while the other is bent on dismantling such policies. It makes for clear battle lines in the upcoming presidential election.

Sorry. A short dip in carbon emissions won’t save the planet after all. Things may even get worse, say the experts.

The world's biggest brewer, AB InBev, says it sees signs of a rebound in China, but warns the next quarter will still be worse overall. Julian Satterthwaite reports.

Stocks on Wall Street jumped Friday despite historic job losses suffered by the economy. Fred Katayama reports.

"Mad Mike" Hughes, a self-styled explorer and daredevil bent on proving that the earth is flat was killed over the weekend when his homemade rocket crashed in the California desert over the weekend.

Worried about whether you have enough toilet paper for the coronavirus lockdown? A German website can tell you how long your supply will last.

Dressed as "Star Wars" characters, local officials in the Philippines are out and about to enforce strict quarantine measures while also handing out relief packages.

A trooper stopping a car with a suspected "impaired driver" on a U.S. highway on Monday was bemused to find a 5-year-old in the driver's seat, the Utah Highway Patrol tweeted.

The sting of the Asian giant hornet can kill and that's not just an expression of speech. Since their discovery in 2019 in the US, traps have been set to see if Asian giant "murder hornets" have settled in the state. Libby Hogan has more.

Rival lawmakers scuffled in Hong Kong's legislature on Friday in a row over electing the chairman of a key committee, a fresh sign of rising political tension as the coronavirus pandemic tapers off in the Chinese-ruled city. Francesca Lynagh reports.

Stocks on Wall Street jumped Friday despite historic job losses suffered by the economy. Fred Katayama reports.

China's policymakers struggle to grapple with a property market, the world's largest, that is crucial for growth yet prone to bubbles springing up in unlikely places.

Daniel Radcliffe joins a slew of celebrities to read Harry Potter at home during lockdown. Emer McCarthy reports.

Archie Mountbatten-Windsor, the son of Britain's Prince Harry and his American wife Meghan, celebrated his first birthday on Wednesday, with his parents marking the occasion with a video of his mother reading him a story.

When the nightclub in which she touted for business in southern Chile was shut down by the authorities as the new coronavirus spread, sex worker Camila Hormazabal was left without access to her sole source of income.

Temperature checks, compulsory face masks and scrupulous hygiene - it's more like going to a hospital than a school, but the Shanghai students returning to class after three months of lockdown are thrilled to be there.

After standing empty for two months, Greece's ancient sites, including the Acropolis hill towering over Athens, will reopen to visitors on May 18, authorities said on Thursday.

Can creative sparks fly through plexiglass? Is the water cooler chat a thing of the past?

Welsh mezzo-soprano Katherine Jenkins will stream a concert from an empty Royal Albert Hall on Friday evening, as locked-down Britain marks the 75th anniversary of "Victory in Europe" Day.

Before she was laid off from her bartending job in Charleston, South Carolina, Shana Swain used to spend her nights serving food and mixing Manhattans and Cosmopolitans.

The U.S. government reported more catastrophic economic fallout from the coronavirus crisis on Friday as the pandemic pierced the very walls of the White House and California gave the green light for its factories to restart after a seven-week lockdown.

गैजेट डेस्क. एलजी ने भारतीय बाजार में अपने डुअल डिस्प्ले वाले स्मार्टफोन एलजी G8X ThinQ को लॉन्च कर दिया है। भारत में इसकी कीमत 49,999 रुपए है। यह स्मार्टफोन डुअल स्क्रीन एक्सेसरीज के साथ आता है, जिससे दूसरी स्क्रीन को डिवाइस के साथ जोड़ा जा सकता है और सुविधानुसार अलग भी किया जा सकता है। यह ऑरोरा ब्लैक कलर ऑप्शन में अवेलेबल है।

Download Dainik Bhaskar App to read Latest Hindi News Today

Sony Corp said on Friday it will manufacture and donate medical face shields to hospitals in Japan, amid worries about the availability of protective equipment for healthcare workers dealing with the coronavirus pandemic.

The Dutch privacy watchdog said on Friday it would investigate how Chinese-owned social media app TikTok, which has become hugely popular during the COVID-19 pandemic, handles the data of millions of young users.

Shares of China's Kingsoft Cloud Holdings Ltd jumped over 25% on its U.S. market debut, indicating strong investor interest at a time when capital markets globally have been roiled by an economic crisis from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tesla Inc "must not reopen" its vehicle factory in the San Francisco Bay area as local lockdown measures to curb the spread of the coronavirus remain in effect, the local county health department said on Friday.

Bitcoin is about to undergo a scheduled technical adjustment as the number of new coins awarded to the computer wizards who "mine" the cryptocurrency will be cut in half, but forecasting which way its price will move afterward is more complicated now.

China's banking and insurance regulator on Saturday issued draft rules on commercial banks' online lending business, banning the use of such loans for riskier investments and capping banks' online consumer credit, in a move to rein in financial risks.

Kingsoft Cloud will debut on Nasdaq, testing appetite for Chinese shares a month after the Luckin Coffee scandal. Data demand is booming in China amid Covid-19, and Kingsoft is a strong rival to market leader Alibaba. Robyn Mak explains why New York might like this listing.

Before she was laid off from her bartending job in Charleston, South Carolina, Shana Swain used to spend her nights serving food and mixing Manhattans and Cosmopolitans.

The U.S. government reported more catastrophic economic fallout from the coronavirus crisis on Friday as the pandemic pierced the very walls of the White House and California gave the green light for its factories to restart after a seven-week lockdown.

China reported one new coronavirus case for Friday, unchanged from the day before, data from the national health authority showed on Saturday.

China will reform its disease prevention and control system to address weaknesses exposed by the coronavirus outbreak, a senior health official said on Saturday.

Chinese regulators have approved Novartis' Mayzent to treat relapsing multiple sclerosis in adults, the Swiss drug maker said in a statement on Saturday.

The Philippines' health ministry reported on Saturday that coronavirus deaths have reached more than 700.