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.

Altijd beschikken over inzichtelijke online marketing data is hét ideaal. Dat maakt performance based marketing mogelijk en zorgt voor blije gezichten in de boardroom en bij klanten. In de praktijk vergt dit veel tijd en geld met bijvoorbeeld de ontwikkeling van een complex KPI dashboard en het continu bijhouden van de dashboard data. Een goede rapporteringsservice maakt het verschil. Die neemt niet alleen die zorg uit handen, maar helpt ook de marketing strategy aanscherpen.

Wat is de waarde van de marketing strategy? Wat leveren de online marketing channels nu echt op? En zijn die leuke social media posts ook doeltreffend? Meten is weten. Daarom zijn marketeers dol op cijfers. Maar verzamelen, analyseren en rapporteren kost veel tijd. Speciale marketing tools nemen wel wat werk uit handen, maar een goede analytics tool en rapporteringsservice levert meer op.

For this blogpost, we interviewed internal communications expert Marieke van Duijnhoven, responsible for employee communications and engagement at Carglass® in The Netherlands. The company’s shift toward increased innovation called for a new vision on internal communications.

Does your brand have a story? Some brand stories are so well-known that they’ve become part of popular culture. We all know the story behind Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg. It’s the same with Virgin and Richard Branson. We’ve seen their companies and products evolve, and it’s almost like we know them – we’ve made an emotional connection.

Isn’t your visual identity just your logo and a letterhead? Well, it is, but it’s also a whole lot more. Think about all of the opportunities you have to highlight your visual brand ID – websites, business cards, office décor, digital and printed brochures and newsletters, signage, trade show booths, banners, products, product packaging, t-shirts, pens, mugs and other swag … the list is practically endless.

For some B2B companies, developing a brand is an afterthought. The focus is on refining and marketing the product, and the brand ends up being created on the fly, by the engineering department or even company execs, just in time for a product launch or an important trade show.

Once you’ve decided to move ahead with a reference marketing program, the first thing to do is determine your objectives. Of course, you want to increase sales, but there are a lot of other benefits you can derive from reference marketing.