Customer reference programs are one of the most powerful tools in the B2B marketing toolkit. Whether you call them success stories, testimonials, reference stories, or advocate marketing, these profiles of your customers and their experiences with your company and product are extremely influential.

Unlike in secondary school, likes on your B2B Facebook page aren’t just about how popular you are. Instead, they’re a key metric in your Facebook marketing strategy. When somebody likes your B2B Facebook page, they’re initiating a relationship with your company and signaling an interest in doing business with you. So how do you keep increasing your Facebook likes and strengthen your engagement?

Do you blog? Many B2B marketers consider blogs the most important form of content that they produce, and a key element in social media for business. In a survey of 5,000+ marketing professionals across the US, UK and Canada, researchers found that 49% of B2B marketers responsible for social media strategy described blogs as the most critical format they use to reach audiences – ranking blogs higher than podcasts, video, live video or other visuals.

When you’re developing a B2B social media marketing plan, there are a few golden rules to remember. These rules of social media marketing aren’t carved in stone, but they provide some good suggestions for how to do social media marketing. There are also some differences when it comes to social media rules for business vs. B2C. (And if you want to learn more, you can download a checklist on Content Marketing Best Practices, for 5 easy-to-implement B2B content marketing tips, at the end of this page.)

If you’re a B2B marketer, chances are you’re churning out a lot of content. “Content is king,” you might be muttering, as you compile stacks of blog posts, white papers, case studies, and more. But in the rush to keep the fresh content coming, you may be making some common mistakes. We’ve put together a list of “what not to do with online content marketing,” to highlight the 5 most common digital marketing failures that we see in B2B content marketing.

Now that you’ve developed a range of high-quality content, carefully matched to each stage of the buyer’s journey, how do you get your prospects to read it? The truth is that even the best content in the world needs help to gain the attention of targeted prospects. It's important to market your content in order to get more online traffic. The internet is the most crowded marketplace on the planet, and there are literally billions of competing voices and distractions.

How would you describe your social media strategy? Is it simply an add-on to your marketing campaigns, or do you have a social media marketing plan? Social media used to be seen as more relevant to B2C – but not anymore. Today, B2B marketers are increasingly using social media to generate leads, build brands and reputation, and even help with recruiting. To answer the question: social media is certainly relevant in B2B marketing!

There’s a lot of pressure on your B2B marketing content to perform. It has to connect with all of your different buyer personas, it has to pull them along all the steps in their buyer’s journey, and ultimately it has to transform them from a prospect into a lead, ready for interaction with your sales team.

Remember mass marketing? If you do, you’re probably familiar with rotary dial phones, and maybe you even owned a Walkman. Mass marketing – which for a long time ruled the sales process – is vanishing into history, along with floppy disks and fax machines. Now, thanks to the internet, content marketing is king, and it completely changed the way companies sell their products and solutions.