25 Post Event Survey Questions to Ask

Just like Joey from "Friends," we recognize the importance of giving and receiving in marketing. One of the best things to give and receive is feedback.

Without feedback, we would never be able to improve. And even though it's hard, feedback is a great way to measure success.

With a post event survey, you'll learn what attendees thought about the event, how they heard about it, and what they enjoyed most. Measuring attendee satisfaction will help you improve your event marketing and figure out what's working and what isn't.

In fact, 90% of virtual event organizers use surveys to measure attendee satisfaction. And 80% report that attendee engagement and satisfaction were KPIs used for measuring event success.

To design a post event survey, you'll want to ask several types of questions -- from Yes/No, rating, to open-ended questions.

Below, let's review the best post event survey questions to ask.

1. How satisfied were you with the event?

First and foremost, it's important to ask attendees about their overall satisfaction with an event. You can also ask participants to rate specific things including the venue, date, speakers, vendors, catering, quality of sessions, amount of sessions, and more.

This will help you gauge specifically how well you did in each area, but also the overall satisfaction of attendees.

This is probably the first and most important question that is asked on most surveys. It's a great starting point for the specific questions that follow next.

2. What was your favorite experience or moment of the event?

This question should be open-ended and let the participants describe what they liked most about the event and why they liked that moment.

This will help you discover what you did right and what experiences are most valuable to your event attendees.

With this information, you can get an idea about how to plan events in the future and figure out if there's anything that a majority of your attendees agree with or want to see again.

3. What could we improve on?

Again, this will be an open-ended question that lets your participants give constructive feedback. While it's hard to hear sometimes, this will help you figure out what resonates with your audiences and what doesn't.

By tracking what audiences don't like, you can then improve and iterate future events so people don't have those barriers about attending your next event.

The point of getting feedback isn't just to receive positive feedback, but to figure out what isn't working as well.

4. How useful was the event?

This is a great question for figuring out how actionable the event content was. Did your attendees find the information useful? Did they learn anything? Were they able to apply something they learned from your event into their work flow?

Depending on the type of event you're holding, this can be a great way to figure out if people felt they got their money's worth.

5. Did the event meet your expectations?

Similar to the question above, this question measures if people got what they thought they were going to get. This answers the question, "Did my audience achieve their goal by attending this event?"

This should be an open-ended question that allows users to expand and explain why the event met their expectations, or why it didn't.

6. How likely would you be to attend our events in the future?

With this question, you'll learn how many people plan to keep up to date with your events. If they were generally satisfied, they'll say yes. If they weren't, they'll say no.

This does a good job of figuring out how well you marketed and sold your company as an authority and trustworthy leader in the industry.

7. Would you recommend our events to a friend or colleague?

Given that people are more likely to purchase a product their friend has shared with them and the importance of customer reviews, referrals are a great way to measure how satisfied your event attendees are.

Liking your event or products isn't enough -- do they like you enough to talk about you with their friends? That's the true mark of success for an event.

8. Did you have an opportunity and place to ask questions and participate?

Whether you provided online support or you had event helpers around the building, it's important to note whether attendees noticed that help and if they felt supported. When you run an event, there are bound to be questions about registration, access to certain workshops, and more.

This question lets you know that your audience knew where to go if they had a question. If they didn't feel like they had a space to ask questions, then you can do better about promoting your support channels.

9. What would have made this event better?

This is a great question to crowdsource event ideas from your target audience. What do they want to see? What gaps did they see in your event from competitors? With this question, you'll be able to brainstorm ways to improve your next event.

10. Why did you attend this event?

You can use this question as a way to inform your pre event marketing. This will let you know what your audience liked about your marketing and what they expected from you. This open-ended question will give you a chance to show up for your audience and give them what they want.

11. How did you hear about this event?

Again, this is a great way to evaluate your pre event marketing. Where are attendees learning about your event? What marketing channels are working best? What marketing channels aren't working at all?

This will tell you where to focus your pre event marketing for your next event and let you know places where you need to pay more attention and improve on.

12. Have you attended this event before?

A great metric to keep track of is how many repeat attendees you have coming to your regular or annual events. This will let you know how many people see the value in your event and want to continue attending.

Again, this metric will let you know where to focus your marketing efforts. Do you want to increase repeat attendance? Then perhaps you need to focus on the customer experience during the event. Do you have great repeat customers but not enough new acquisitions? This will let you know that you need to focus on pre event marketing channels.

13. Would you want to attend this event again in the future?

This question, while similar to one of the above, measures how likely someone is to attend the same event in the future. Do they see value in attending this event every year? Or do they feel like they got everything they needed?

Again, just like it's easier to retain customers than get new ones, it's easier to convince former participants to attend the same event again. This will reveal if your audience is excited about coming to your event in the future and then you can compare with the number of attendees who actually came back the next year.

14. Have you attended our other events before?

This question will let you know how many loyal followers you have. Are the people coming to your events in your community? Or are these new people who haven't heard of your brand before? This will help you measure where you're acquiring event attendees.

15. Were you satisfied with the amount of activities/workshops?

This is a specific question that measures satisfaction with the quantity of activities or workshops available to attendees. Essentially, was there enough for your participants to do during the event. Or was there too much? Either way, this question is important to figure out if you and your audience are aligned on what content they want.

16. Were you satisfied with the quality of the content?

Once you know how much content to offer your audience, it's time to ask about the quality of the content. Did they find the information helpful? Was this worth paying for? This will help establish trust with your audience that you can present high quality content and information that they find valuable and useful.

This will also help you gauge what content your audience is interested in. If they were not satisfied with the quality, it could be because the type of content, the speakers, or the way it was presented.

17. How helpful was the staff at the event?

This is an excellent question that will help you figure out how your staff performed during this event. When attendees asked questions or used support, was the staff friendly and helpful? Or was there a staffing issue?

This will help you figure out how quickly issues were resolved and if participants enjoyed their experience.

18. What was your biggest takeaway from the event?

Again, this helps you determine what people were able to learn from your event and what they got out of it. Does that align with your goals for the event? If not, this is a great way to learn what people took away from your event and what they expected.

19. How satisfied were you with the virtual experience?

If you're holding a virtual event, it's important to add post event questions that measure the success of the virtual experience.

You can leave this as a rating and/or an optional open-ended question to let people explain why they were or were not satisfied with the virtual experience. Attendees might comment on the ease of navigation or the audio quality, for instance.

20. What were your favorite virtual features?

If you offered any special online features or an event app, this is the place to figure out what your attendees thought about those features. This lets you measure the success of your virtual platform overall -- did this platform provide features that your audience liked? Or were there other features they wished were available?

21. How easy to navigate was the platform for the event?

Similarly, this question is meant to measure the effectiveness of your online platform for your virtual events. If the platform isn't intuitive or easy for participants to use, then they probably won't consider coming back for your other events. This will help you gauge if improvements need to be made to the online experience.

22. How satisfied were you with the networking opportunities provided?

Lots of marketing events are meant to allow networking and a lot of people attend these events to network with other professionals. If networking is something that your audience wants from you, it's important to measure the success of your networking opportunities.

This can be a rating question or an open-ended question so your attendees can elaborate on what they liked about the networking opportunities or didn't like.

23. What topics would you want to see more of at future events?

Again, it's always a good idea to learn what content your audience wants to see. How can you figure that out? Just ask.

In your survey, you can ask what type of topics they're interested in learning about in the future. This will also give you new perspectives and content ideas for your next event.

24. How did this event impact your perception of our company?

This is a great question for learning how effective your brand story and messaging is at your event. Is your branding clear through your event marketing materials? How does it fit in to the larger strategic picture? This question will let you track how effective your event was in terms of branding.

25. Please share any additional comments, thoughts, suggestions for future events.

Of course, ending with an open-ended question where participants can leave feedback on any area is a best practice. You want your attendees to feel like they can tell you their overall thoughts and opinions.

Hopefully the questions in your survey got your attendees thinking and they might also feel like there are other topics to cover. Since you can't ask every question you'd probably like to, this helps you figure out what's important to your audience.

Post event surveys are mainly used to measure how successful an event was. These surveys will give you information that you need to improve future events.

Now, post event survey questions aren't the only type of surveys you'll want to send out. You might consider also sending a pre-event survey. A pre-event survey will help you measure your current event marketing, see what got people excited about the event in the first place, and how to tailor the event to the actual attendees.

Here are some examples of what that might look like.

1. How did you hear about this event?

This question is great to ask either before or after an event. You could send this in a pre event survey to figure out what marketing channels are working the best. This will help you make changes to your budget and priorities when you continue marketing the event.

2. What are you most excited about?

With this pre event question, you can gauge what people are most looking forward to. Again, this will help inform your marketing budget and priorities so you can fulfill any customer expectations.

3. Have you attended this event before?

Similar to the first question, this can be asked before or after an event. The reason to find this out before an event is to see if you are getting a lot of repeat attendees or if you need to do more marketing to previous attendees.

4. Why did you choose to attend this event?

This is a great question to ask before an event because it will tell you what people are most looking forward to. This will help you prepare for an event so you can deliver on what people are expecting.

5. Do you have special accommodations you would like us to be aware of?

Logistically, this is important to know. If you don't have a lot of attendees, and accommodations need to be made, then you should be aware of what those accommodations are. If you're holding a larger event, you need to consider the type of accommodations you'll need to make for various attendees.

6. Was there any event information that was difficult for you to find?

Again, this will help you make adjustments to the pre event and registration process while it's still going on. This should help you get more registrants, ultimately, because you can pivot your strategy in real time.

7. Which social media platform do you use the most?

If you don't have a plan for how you're going to communicate with your attendees during the event, social media is a great option. But what platform would work best? You can use a pre event survey to learn what social media platforms your audience uses the most, so you can provide helpful information during your event.

Conducting pre or post event surveys is an important part of measuring the success of your event team and marketing team. To do this, you can use a survey tool, like HubSpot. Regardless of the tool you use, remember that the goal of sending a survey is to receive both positive and constructive feedback so that you can improve your event marketing and events.

from Marketing https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/post-event-survey-questions

Just like Joey from "Friends," we recognize the importance of giving and receiving in marketing. One of the best things to give and receive is feedback.

Without feedback, we would never be able to improve. And even though it's hard, feedback is a great way to measure success.

With a post event survey, you'll learn what attendees thought about the event, how they heard about it, and what they enjoyed most. Measuring attendee satisfaction will help you improve your event marketing and figure out what's working and what isn't.

In fact, 90% of virtual event organizers use surveys to measure attendee satisfaction. And 80% report that attendee engagement and satisfaction were KPIs used for measuring event success.

To design a post event survey, you'll want to ask several types of questions -- from Yes/No, rating, to open-ended questions.

Below, let's review the best post event survey questions to ask.

1. How satisfied were you with the event?

First and foremost, it's important to ask attendees about their overall satisfaction with an event. You can also ask participants to rate specific things including the venue, date, speakers, vendors, catering, quality of sessions, amount of sessions, and more.

This will help you gauge specifically how well you did in each area, but also the overall satisfaction of attendees.

This is probably the first and most important question that is asked on most surveys. It's a great starting point for the specific questions that follow next.

2. What was your favorite experience or moment of the event?

This question should be open-ended and let the participants describe what they liked most about the event and why they liked that moment.

This will help you discover what you did right and what experiences are most valuable to your event attendees.

With this information, you can get an idea about how to plan events in the future and figure out if there's anything that a majority of your attendees agree with or want to see again.

3. What could we improve on?

Again, this will be an open-ended question that lets your participants give constructive feedback. While it's hard to hear sometimes, this will help you figure out what resonates with your audiences and what doesn't.

By tracking what audiences don't like, you can then improve and iterate future events so people don't have those barriers about attending your next event.

The point of getting feedback isn't just to receive positive feedback, but to figure out what isn't working as well.

4. How useful was the event?

This is a great question for figuring out how actionable the event content was. Did your attendees find the information useful? Did they learn anything? Were they able to apply something they learned from your event into their work flow?

Depending on the type of event you're holding, this can be a great way to figure out if people felt they got their money's worth.

5. Did the event meet your expectations?

Similar to the question above, this question measures if people got what they thought they were going to get. This answers the question, "Did my audience achieve their goal by attending this event?"

This should be an open-ended question that allows users to expand and explain why the event met their expectations, or why it didn't.

6. How likely would you be to attend our events in the future?

With this question, you'll learn how many people plan to keep up to date with your events. If they were generally satisfied, they'll say yes. If they weren't, they'll say no.

This does a good job of figuring out how well you marketed and sold your company as an authority and trustworthy leader in the industry.

7. Would you recommend our events to a friend or colleague?

Given that people are more likely to purchase a product their friend has shared with them and the importance of customer reviews, referrals are a great way to measure how satisfied your event attendees are.

Liking your event or products isn't enough -- do they like you enough to talk about you with their friends? That's the true mark of success for an event.

8. Did you have an opportunity and place to ask questions and participate?

Whether you provided online support or you had event helpers around the building, it's important to note whether attendees noticed that help and if they felt supported. When you run an event, there are bound to be questions about registration, access to certain workshops, and more.

This question lets you know that your audience knew where to go if they had a question. If they didn't feel like they had a space to ask questions, then you can do better about promoting your support channels.

9. What would have made this event better?

This is a great question to crowdsource event ideas from your target audience. What do they want to see? What gaps did they see in your event from competitors? With this question, you'll be able to brainstorm ways to improve your next event.

10. Why did you attend this event?

You can use this question as a way to inform your pre event marketing. This will let you know what your audience liked about your marketing and what they expected from you. This open-ended question will give you a chance to show up for your audience and give them what they want.

11. How did you hear about this event?

Again, this is a great way to evaluate your pre event marketing. Where are attendees learning about your event? What marketing channels are working best? What marketing channels aren't working at all?

This will tell you where to focus your pre event marketing for your next event and let you know places where you need to pay more attention and improve on.

12. Have you attended this event before?

A great metric to keep track of is how many repeat attendees you have coming to your regular or annual events. This will let you know how many people see the value in your event and want to continue attending.

Again, this metric will let you know where to focus your marketing efforts. Do you want to increase repeat attendance? Then perhaps you need to focus on the customer experience during the event. Do you have great repeat customers but not enough new acquisitions? This will let you know that you need to focus on pre event marketing channels.

13. Would you want to attend this event again in the future?

This question, while similar to one of the above, measures how likely someone is to attend the same event in the future. Do they see value in attending this event every year? Or do they feel like they got everything they needed?

Again, just like it's easier to retain customers than get new ones, it's easier to convince former participants to attend the same event again. This will reveal if your audience is excited about coming to your event in the future and then you can compare with the number of attendees who actually came back the next year.

14. Have you attended our other events before?

This question will let you know how many loyal followers you have. Are the people coming to your events in your community? Or are these new people who haven't heard of your brand before? This will help you measure where you're acquiring event attendees.

15. Were you satisfied with the amount of activities/workshops?

This is a specific question that measures satisfaction with the quantity of activities or workshops available to attendees. Essentially, was there enough for your participants to do during the event. Or was there too much? Either way, this question is important to figure out if you and your audience are aligned on what content they want.

16. Were you satisfied with the quality of the content?

Once you know how much content to offer your audience, it's time to ask about the quality of the content. Did they find the information helpful? Was this worth paying for? This will help establish trust with your audience that you can present high quality content and information that they find valuable and useful.

This will also help you gauge what content your audience is interested in. If they were not satisfied with the quality, it could be because the type of content, the speakers, or the way it was presented.

17. How helpful was the staff at the event?

This is an excellent question that will help you figure out how your staff performed during this event. When attendees asked questions or used support, was the staff friendly and helpful? Or was there a staffing issue?

This will help you figure out how quickly issues were resolved and if participants enjoyed their experience.

18. What was your biggest takeaway from the event?

Again, this helps you determine what people were able to learn from your event and what they got out of it. Does that align with your goals for the event? If not, this is a great way to learn what people took away from your event and what they expected.

19. How satisfied were you with the virtual experience?

If you're holding a virtual event, it's important to add post event questions that measure the success of the virtual experience.

You can leave this as a rating and/or an optional open-ended question to let people explain why they were or were not satisfied with the virtual experience. Attendees might comment on the ease of navigation or the audio quality, for instance.

20. What were your favorite virtual features?

If you offered any special online features or an event app, this is the place to figure out what your attendees thought about those features. This lets you measure the success of your virtual platform overall -- did this platform provide features that your audience liked? Or were there other features they wished were available?

21. How easy to navigate was the platform for the event?

Similarly, this question is meant to measure the effectiveness of your online platform for your virtual events. If the platform isn't intuitive or easy for participants to use, then they probably won't consider coming back for your other events. This will help you gauge if improvements need to be made to the online experience.

22. How satisfied were you with the networking opportunities provided?

Lots of marketing events are meant to allow networking and a lot of people attend these events to network with other professionals. If networking is something that your audience wants from you, it's important to measure the success of your networking opportunities.

This can be a rating question or an open-ended question so your attendees can elaborate on what they liked about the networking opportunities or didn't like.

23. What topics would you want to see more of at future events?

Again, it's always a good idea to learn what content your audience wants to see. How can you figure that out? Just ask.

In your survey, you can ask what type of topics they're interested in learning about in the future. This will also give you new perspectives and content ideas for your next event.

24. How did this event impact your perception of our company?

This is a great question for learning how effective your brand story and messaging is at your event. Is your branding clear through your event marketing materials? How does it fit in to the larger strategic picture? This question will let you track how effective your event was in terms of branding.

25. Please share any additional comments, thoughts, suggestions for future events.

Of course, ending with an open-ended question where participants can leave feedback on any area is a best practice. You want your attendees to feel like they can tell you their overall thoughts and opinions.

Hopefully the questions in your survey got your attendees thinking and they might also feel like there are other topics to cover. Since you can't ask every question you'd probably like to, this helps you figure out what's important to your audience.

Post event surveys are mainly used to measure how successful an event was. These surveys will give you information that you need to improve future events.

Now, post event survey questions aren't the only type of surveys you'll want to send out. You might consider also sending a pre-event survey. A pre-event survey will help you measure your current event marketing, see what got people excited about the event in the first place, and how to tailor the event to the actual attendees.

Here are some examples of what that might look like.

1. How did you hear about this event?

This question is great to ask either before or after an event. You could send this in a pre event survey to figure out what marketing channels are working the best. This will help you make changes to your budget and priorities when you continue marketing the event.

2. What are you most excited about?

With this pre event question, you can gauge what people are most looking forward to. Again, this will help inform your marketing budget and priorities so you can fulfill any customer expectations.

3. Have you attended this event before?

Similar to the first question, this can be asked before or after an event. The reason to find this out before an event is to see if you are getting a lot of repeat attendees or if you need to do more marketing to previous attendees.

4. Why did you choose to attend this event?

This is a great question to ask before an event because it will tell you what people are most looking forward to. This will help you prepare for an event so you can deliver on what people are expecting.

5. Do you have special accommodations you would like us to be aware of?

Logistically, this is important to know. If you don't have a lot of attendees, and accommodations need to be made, then you should be aware of what those accommodations are. If you're holding a larger event, you need to consider the type of accommodations you'll need to make for various attendees.

6. Was there any event information that was difficult for you to find?

Again, this will help you make adjustments to the pre event and registration process while it's still going on. This should help you get more registrants, ultimately, because you can pivot your strategy in real time.

7. Which social media platform do you use the most?

If you don't have a plan for how you're going to communicate with your attendees during the event, social media is a great option. But what platform would work best? You can use a pre event survey to learn what social media platforms your audience uses the most, so you can provide helpful information during your event.

Conducting pre or post event surveys is an important part of measuring the success of your event team and marketing team. To do this, you can use a survey tool, like HubSpot. Regardless of the tool you use, remember that the goal of sending a survey is to receive both positive and constructive feedback so that you can improve your event marketing and events.

via Perfecte news Non connection

13 Things NOT to Do on Facebook

These days, most businesses know they need to have a presence on Facebook. Searching for a business on Facebook and seeing they don't have a page garners the same reaction from users as searching for a business on Google and seeing they don't have a website: They just don't look legitimate.

But once you've created your business page, navigating the waters of building a Facebook presence is another matter entirely. How often should you post? When should you post? Why are your images all pixelated, and how can you fix them? Do you really have to respond to that troll?

Many mistakes businesses make on Facebook are entirely preventable. To help you avoid these pitfalls and operate your Facebook page smoothly, we've listed some of the most common mistakes businesses make with their Facebook marketing. Here's what not to do.

13 Facebook Mistakes to Avoid

1. Don't create a profile instead of a page for your business.

This may seem elementary, but you'd be surprised by how many people make this mistake. Before we get to more advanced tips, let's set the record straight: Facebook profiles are meant for people, while Facebook pages are meant for businesses.

2. Don't have multiple Facebook accounts.

This advice applies to both your personal and professional activities on Facebook. You might think having more than one Facebook account helps you separate your personal life from your work, family, or school life. Let’s be real, you can’t have your great Aunt Debrah commenting on your embarrassing college photos from ten years ago causing them to resurface in people’s timelines.

On a more practical note, Facebook does limit personal accounts to 5,000 friends. After that, people will need to follow you which limits the type of engagement they can have with your content. As a fix, you might think a second or third account might be a good idea.

However, there are two reasons why you wouldn't want to have two accounts. The main reason is that Facebook doesn't allow users to have more than one personal account — it's against their Terms of Service. So if they find out you have two personal accounts, they'll shut them down.

The second reason is that, even if it weren't against their terms, having two personal accounts would be a pain to maintain. Do you have enough content going up on both to round out your presence? Where do you draw the line between the two? Which account will you show to your friend who works in your industry? Instead of having to delineate between two parts of your life, you should instead take advantage of Facebook's robust privacy settings.

On the professional side, there are no such restrictions from Facebook. You can make several pages for your business without the social network even noticing. But should you?

For most businesses, we don't recommend it. You've only got so much time in the day to devote to Facebook — why spread yourself thin just to maintain several pages?

Plus, there are lots of other great options for you. First, you can take advantage of Facebook's targeting options — you don't need to pay to send updates to certain segments of your audience. Instead of creating a page for one segment of your audience, you can just post tailored content to be shown only to them.

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Second, if you have a huge audience that lives all over the world, you can think about implementing a global page. If you'd like to get your global page set up, you need to get in contact with Facebook directly. (Full disclosure: You'll probably already need to have a hefty Facebook ad budget in place to make this happen.)

In short: Keep it simple. Don't create more accounts and pages than you need.

3. Don't neglect the posts or comments on your page.

JetBlue's manager of customer commitment Laurie Meacham once told me, "We're all about the people, and being on social media is just a natural extension of that. It's no different than any other part of the airline."

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No matter your industry, that couldn't be more true. The point of business accounts on Facebook is to interact with your customers and prospects who are already engaging there. (And considering as of Q4 2020, Facebook had just under two billion active users, it's likely that they are engaging out there.)

Ignoring comments and interactions is like saying to your customers, "I don't care what you have to say." To avoid this, start by making sure that the desired publishing options for your Timeline are turned on. While some businesses allow users to post and leave comments on their page without review, others prefer to manually approve them, and some don't allow publishing permissions at all.

Although the choice is entirely up to you, we recommend that you treat your page like a two-way street rather than a channel to broadcast your voice, and your voice only.

Once you've got that straightened out, be sure to monitor the comments daily and respond when appropriate.

Pro Tip: For time-saving tips, flip through our free ebook on how to monitor your social media accounts in 10 minutes a day.

4. Don't ignore negativity.

What if customers complain? What if they troll?

You can't stop people from saying things about your brand, good or bad. What you can do is respond respectfully and with helpful information based on the comments that were shared. Responding not only shows people you're concerned about their happiness but it also shows that you're engaged and listening.

5. Don't leave the meta description as is.

When you paste a link into a new Facebook post, the metadata from that post (an image and a short description) gets pulled in automatically. But that doesn't mean you should just press "Publish." Instead, add some relevant post copy like a quote or statistic from the article you're linking to.

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In addition to editing the post copy, you'll want to remove the URL from the box before posting. Knowing that Facebook automatically populates metadata when you paste a link, deleting the extra URL will help to reduce visual clutter without messing with the post.

6. Don't just post photos.

Video is now consumers’ favorite type of content on Facebook. As of 2020, 17% of all content on the platform is video content..

Instead of sticking to one or two content types, experiment a little bit. Facebook is a place where you can let your brand's personality shine. Post company culture pictures and have people tag themselves. Consider having Facebook Q&A discussions. Post links with one-word copy, and others with several paragraphs of copy. Find out what works best for your audience, and remember that your audience is always changing — so test continually.

7. Don't make your posts too long.

Again, testing post length is the best way to gauge what your audience likes. The optimal length of your Facebook Timeline posts will vary from company to company. For some, longer, informative Facebook posts perform better. For others, like BuzzFeed, short ones work perfectly.

While it's important to experiment and see what your audience responds to best, here's what we will say: There is some solid evidence that shorter posts generate the highest engagement — in fact, a HubSpot research experiment found that posts with about 40 characters in length received more engagement than longer posts.

8. Don't post images of just any size.

Pixelated, cluttered, or difficult-to-read visuals will not only frustrate users, but they'll also give you a bad reputation.

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Not only does Facebook have specific image dimensions for profile photos and cover photos, (although those are important, too), it also has ideal image dimensions for images you post on your timeline, the ones you use in sponsored posts, sidebar ads, and so on. To help you keep everything straight, bookmark this handy cheat sheet.

9. Don't post click-bait.

When you link to a web page in a Facebook post, the platform tracks dwell time on the page to see how much time people spend looking at it. The lesson? Don't post click-bait headlines that don't deliver on your promises.

If you're looking to meet the needs of your audience on Facebook, consider posting links to clear, informative blog articles. When the headline sets the right expectation for what a user can expect from the content, it's easier for them to see the value in what you're offering and remain on the page to read the article. When it doesn't, they bounce off the page and Facebook takes note.

10. Don't assume you should only post during business hours.

A Sprout Social study found that the best times and days to post on Facebook vary by industry. However, the common theme across industries using Facebook to generate engagement is that activity on the platform hits a peak on Wednesdays and the best time to post is early afternoon.

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What about weekends? Sprout Social also noted that Sundays are, across the board, the worst days to publish content to Facebook. In summary, stick with publishing posts during the middle of the week, right before engagement and activity wane heading into the weekend.

11. Don't post too often (but do post regularly.)

Yes, you should post regularly to keep your audience engaged, show them you're present and listening, and answer their questions and concerns.

However, what you don't want to do is overwhelm them with tons and tons of posts. We even ran a few experiments to figure out how often businesses should post on Facebook. Our research included posting frequency benchmarks by industry and company size based on Facebook data from thousands of our customers.

What we found was this: Companies that are selective about what they publish — i.e. they take the time to craft a smaller number of high-quality Facebook posts instead of a lot of Facebook posts — performed best.

12. Don't forget to experiment with targeting and ads.

As a result of the recent decline in organic reach on Facebook, many companies are turning to Facebook advertising to capture the attention of a more qualified audience. With Facebook advertising, you can target people who've visited your website, used your app, or signed up for an email list. You can also target similar or "Lookalike" audiences or set up campaigns aimed at getting likes on your page.

But you can't just throw money at Facebook advertising and expect everything to work. It'll only work if you're smart about it — which means experimenting and tweaking your advertising plan to see what works.

Where should you start? We created this step-by-step guide to digital advertising to help marketers learn how to create successful Facebook ads. And if you want to check out examples of real Facebook ads that have worked really well for brands, check out this blog post.

13. Don't forget which account you're posting from.

The Facebook News Feed looks basically the same whether you're logged in to your personal account or your company's account, making it all too easy for Page administrators to forget which one they're posting from. You wouldn't want to respond to commenters from your personal account when you meant to respond from your business account or vice versa.

Image Source

However, the truth is sometimes accidents happen. In fact, one of my colleagues accidentally posted a picture of her baby bump from HubSpot's Twitter account. While it was a harmless mistake, she wrote up a blog article to provide businesses with the advice they need to overcome a social media slip-up.

Do This Not That On Facebook

Facebook is one of the longest-standing social media platforms that businesses rely on to reach their audiences. And it makes sense — more than a third of the people on earth use Facebook. With such a large audience watching for the latest and greatest social content to connect with, you must be certain that you put your best foot forward when publishing posts. I hope this list gives you more than enough ideas for what not to do on Facebook so you aren’t caught off guard by even the wildest faux pas.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in June 2015 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

from Marketing https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/9134/top-5-things-not-to-do-on-facebook.aspx

These days, most businesses know they need to have a presence on Facebook. Searching for a business on Facebook and seeing they don't have a page garners the same reaction from users as searching for a business on Google and seeing they don't have a website: They just don't look legitimate.

But once you've created your business page, navigating the waters of building a Facebook presence is another matter entirely. How often should you post? When should you post? Why are your images all pixelated, and how can you fix them? Do you really have to respond to that troll?

Many mistakes businesses make on Facebook are entirely preventable. To help you avoid these pitfalls and operate your Facebook page smoothly, we've listed some of the most common mistakes businesses make with their Facebook marketing. Here's what not to do.

13 Facebook Mistakes to Avoid

1. Don't create a profile instead of a page for your business.

This may seem elementary, but you'd be surprised by how many people make this mistake. Before we get to more advanced tips, let's set the record straight: Facebook profiles are meant for people, while Facebook pages are meant for businesses.

2. Don't have multiple Facebook accounts.

This advice applies to both your personal and professional activities on Facebook. You might think having more than one Facebook account helps you separate your personal life from your work, family, or school life. Let’s be real, you can’t have your great Aunt Debrah commenting on your embarrassing college photos from ten years ago causing them to resurface in people’s timelines.

On a more practical note, Facebook does limit personal accounts to 5,000 friends. After that, people will need to follow you which limits the type of engagement they can have with your content. As a fix, you might think a second or third account might be a good idea.

However, there are two reasons why you wouldn't want to have two accounts. The main reason is that Facebook doesn't allow users to have more than one personal account — it's against their Terms of Service. So if they find out you have two personal accounts, they'll shut them down.

The second reason is that, even if it weren't against their terms, having two personal accounts would be a pain to maintain. Do you have enough content going up on both to round out your presence? Where do you draw the line between the two? Which account will you show to your friend who works in your industry? Instead of having to delineate between two parts of your life, you should instead take advantage of Facebook's robust privacy settings.

On the professional side, there are no such restrictions from Facebook. You can make several pages for your business without the social network even noticing. But should you?

For most businesses, we don't recommend it. You've only got so much time in the day to devote to Facebook — why spread yourself thin just to maintain several pages?

Plus, there are lots of other great options for you. First, you can take advantage of Facebook's targeting options — you don't need to pay to send updates to certain segments of your audience. Instead of creating a page for one segment of your audience, you can just post tailored content to be shown only to them.

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Second, if you have a huge audience that lives all over the world, you can think about implementing a global page. If you'd like to get your global page set up, you need to get in contact with Facebook directly. (Full disclosure: You'll probably already need to have a hefty Facebook ad budget in place to make this happen.)

In short: Keep it simple. Don't create more accounts and pages than you need.

3. Don't neglect the posts or comments on your page.

JetBlue's manager of customer commitment Laurie Meacham once told me, "We're all about the people, and being on social media is just a natural extension of that. It's no different than any other part of the airline."

Image Source

No matter your industry, that couldn't be more true. The point of business accounts on Facebook is to interact with your customers and prospects who are already engaging there. (And considering as of Q4 2020, Facebook had just under two billion active users, it's likely that they are engaging out there.)

Ignoring comments and interactions is like saying to your customers, "I don't care what you have to say." To avoid this, start by making sure that the desired publishing options for your Timeline are turned on. While some businesses allow users to post and leave comments on their page without review, others prefer to manually approve them, and some don't allow publishing permissions at all.

Although the choice is entirely up to you, we recommend that you treat your page like a two-way street rather than a channel to broadcast your voice, and your voice only.

Once you've got that straightened out, be sure to monitor the comments daily and respond when appropriate.

Pro Tip: For time-saving tips, flip through our free ebook on how to monitor your social media accounts in 10 minutes a day.

4. Don't ignore negativity.

What if customers complain? What if they troll?

You can't stop people from saying things about your brand, good or bad. What you can do is respond respectfully and with helpful information based on the comments that were shared. Responding not only shows people you're concerned about their happiness but it also shows that you're engaged and listening.

5. Don't leave the meta description as is.

When you paste a link into a new Facebook post, the metadata from that post (an image and a short description) gets pulled in automatically. But that doesn't mean you should just press "Publish." Instead, add some relevant post copy like a quote or statistic from the article you're linking to.

Image Source

In addition to editing the post copy, you'll want to remove the URL from the box before posting. Knowing that Facebook automatically populates metadata when you paste a link, deleting the extra URL will help to reduce visual clutter without messing with the post.

6. Don't just post photos.

Video is now consumers’ favorite type of content on Facebook. As of 2020, 17% of all content on the platform is video content..

Instead of sticking to one or two content types, experiment a little bit. Facebook is a place where you can let your brand's personality shine. Post company culture pictures and have people tag themselves. Consider having Facebook Q&A discussions. Post links with one-word copy, and others with several paragraphs of copy. Find out what works best for your audience, and remember that your audience is always changing — so test continually.

7. Don't make your posts too long.

Again, testing post length is the best way to gauge what your audience likes. The optimal length of your Facebook Timeline posts will vary from company to company. For some, longer, informative Facebook posts perform better. For others, like BuzzFeed, short ones work perfectly.

While it's important to experiment and see what your audience responds to best, here's what we will say: There is some solid evidence that shorter posts generate the highest engagement — in fact, a HubSpot research experiment found that posts with about 40 characters in length received more engagement than longer posts.

8. Don't post images of just any size.

Pixelated, cluttered, or difficult-to-read visuals will not only frustrate users, but they'll also give you a bad reputation.

Image Source

Not only does Facebook have specific image dimensions for profile photos and cover photos, (although those are important, too), it also has ideal image dimensions for images you post on your timeline, the ones you use in sponsored posts, sidebar ads, and so on. To help you keep everything straight, bookmark this handy cheat sheet.

9. Don't post click-bait.

When you link to a web page in a Facebook post, the platform tracks dwell time on the page to see how much time people spend looking at it. The lesson? Don't post click-bait headlines that don't deliver on your promises.

If you're looking to meet the needs of your audience on Facebook, consider posting links to clear, informative blog articles. When the headline sets the right expectation for what a user can expect from the content, it's easier for them to see the value in what you're offering and remain on the page to read the article. When it doesn't, they bounce off the page and Facebook takes note.

10. Don't assume you should only post during business hours.

A Sprout Social study found that the best times and days to post on Facebook vary by industry. However, the common theme across industries using Facebook to generate engagement is that activity on the platform hits a peak on Wednesdays and the best time to post is early afternoon.

Image Source

What about weekends? Sprout Social also noted that Sundays are, across the board, the worst days to publish content to Facebook. In summary, stick with publishing posts during the middle of the week, right before engagement and activity wane heading into the weekend.

11. Don't post too often (but do post regularly.)

Yes, you should post regularly to keep your audience engaged, show them you're present and listening, and answer their questions and concerns.

However, what you don't want to do is overwhelm them with tons and tons of posts. We even ran a few experiments to figure out how often businesses should post on Facebook. Our research included posting frequency benchmarks by industry and company size based on Facebook data from thousands of our customers.

What we found was this: Companies that are selective about what they publish — i.e. they take the time to craft a smaller number of high-quality Facebook posts instead of a lot of Facebook posts — performed best.

12. Don't forget to experiment with targeting and ads.

As a result of the recent decline in organic reach on Facebook, many companies are turning to Facebook advertising to capture the attention of a more qualified audience. With Facebook advertising, you can target people who've visited your website, used your app, or signed up for an email list. You can also target similar or "Lookalike" audiences or set up campaigns aimed at getting likes on your page.

But you can't just throw money at Facebook advertising and expect everything to work. It'll only work if you're smart about it — which means experimenting and tweaking your advertising plan to see what works.

Where should you start? We created this step-by-step guide to digital advertising to help marketers learn how to create successful Facebook ads. And if you want to check out examples of real Facebook ads that have worked really well for brands, check out this blog post.

13. Don't forget which account you're posting from.

The Facebook News Feed looks basically the same whether you're logged in to your personal account or your company's account, making it all too easy for Page administrators to forget which one they're posting from. You wouldn't want to respond to commenters from your personal account when you meant to respond from your business account or vice versa.

Image Source

However, the truth is sometimes accidents happen. In fact, one of my colleagues accidentally posted a picture of her baby bump from HubSpot's Twitter account. While it was a harmless mistake, she wrote up a blog article to provide businesses with the advice they need to overcome a social media slip-up.

Do This Not That On Facebook

Facebook is one of the longest-standing social media platforms that businesses rely on to reach their audiences. And it makes sense — more than a third of the people on earth use Facebook. With such a large audience watching for the latest and greatest social content to connect with, you must be certain that you put your best foot forward when publishing posts. I hope this list gives you more than enough ideas for what not to do on Facebook so you aren’t caught off guard by even the wildest faux pas.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in June 2015 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

via Perfecte news Non connection

The Ultimate Guide to B2B Marketing in 2021

Effective marketing is difficult to get right. Between creative demands, budget limits, and channel decisions, marketers have a lot to juggle when developing their marketing strategy.

The biggest determinant of effective marketing, however, is your audience.

If you’re not properly targeting your buyer persona, your promotions and advertisements will likely fall on deaf ears. You might as well not be marketing at all.

Where target audiences vary the most, though, is between individual consumers and businesses. Some companies serve individual shoppers, while others cater to companies and organizations.

Marketing to businesses is very different than marketing to individual consumers. That’s why an entirely different marketing method — B2B marketing — exists, and that’s why we built this guide. By the end of this article, you’ll have a better understanding of B2B marketing, the most effective B2B marketing strategies, and how you can tap into and convert your business audience.

HubSpot is an example of a company that engages in B2B marketing. HubSpot’s customers are other businesses, not individual consumers. Therefore, all of our marketing efforts can be classified as B2B.

B2B vs B2C Marketing

B2B and B2C (business-to-consumer) marketing are very different. B2B and B2C marketing differ in their respective strategies and applications, as well as in their audiences and how they communicate to them.

B2B marketing targets the needs, interests, and challenges of individuals who are making purchases on behalf of, or for, their organization (rather than for themselves), thus making the organization the customer. Here are a few examples of B2B companies:

• A coworking space that leases office spaces to remote teams and freelancers (like WeWork)
• An on-demand order fulfillment, warehousing, and screen printing service (like Printful)
• A marketing software company that sells social media management tools, lead generation software, and other marketing tools to businesses and organizations (like HubSpot!)

B2C marketing targets the needs, interests, and challenges of individual consumers who are making purchases on behalf of, or for, themselves, thus making the individual the customer. Here are a few examples of B2C companies:

• An e-commerce company that sells office supplies to remote or self-employed individuals (like Poppin)
• A store that sells t-shirts and other clothing and accessories (like Target)
• A music platform that sells streaming subscriptions (like Spotify)

Take a look at this chart comparing B2B and B2C customers.

	for b2b marketing	for b2c marketing
Goal	Customers are focused on ROI, efficiency, and expertise.	Customers are seeking deals and entertainment (which means marketing needs to be more fun).
Purchase Motivation	Customers are driven by logic and financial incentive.	Customers are driven by emotion.
Drivers	Customers want to be educated (which is where B2B content marketing comes in).	Customers appreciate education but don’t always need it to make a purchase decision.
Purchase Process	Customers like (if not prefer) to work with account managers and salespeople.	Customers like to make purchases directly.
People Involved in Purchase	Customers often have to confer with decision makers and other members of their chain of command before making a purchase decision.	Customers rarely need to confer with others before making a purchase decision.
Purchase Purpose	Customers make purchases for long-term solutions, resulting in a longer sales cycle, longer contracts, and longer relationships with companies.	Customers aren’t necessarily looking for long-term solutions or long-term relationships.

As much as they differ, though, B2B and B2C also intersect in many ways. While Poppin sells office supplies to remote or self-employed individuals, they also design corporate office spaces and branded supplies. On the flip side, Printful not only offers order fulfillment and warehousing to businesses; they also fill e-commerce printing orders for individuals.

As distinct as the B2B and B2C marketing audiences can be, B2B marketers can always learn from B2C campaigns, too.

B2B Marketing Strategies

As I said above, marketing depends on its audience. While B2B and B2C marketing vary, not every piece of B2B marketing material is alike, either.

In this section, we’ll talk about various B2B marketing strategies you can implement to reach your specific business audience. Before we dive in, though, make sure you understand the B2B buyer’s journey. Take note of how each of these stages may affect your marketing strategies and how you implement them.

B2B Email Marketing

Email marketing is a tried and true method of reaching both individual consumers and business customers. Did you know that 93% of B2B marketers use email? Are you one of them? You should be. Emails lead to engagement which turns subscribers into leads … and then customers.

Download our guide to optimizing email marketing for conversions and learn how to grow your email list, ensure deliverability, and increase engagement.

Unlike B2C customers who respond best to emotions and entertainment, B2B customers look for logic and positive ROI. Essentially, they’re asking themselves, How can your business help my business grow? Because of this, your email marketing must consistently resonate with your business customers and focus on things that matter to them — like time, money, and resources.

Email marketing is also a powerful vehicle for sharing your brand’s content. 83% of B2B companies use email newsletters as part of their content marketing program, and 40% of B2B marketers say these newsletters are most critical to their content marketing success.

With the constant barrage of emails flooding our inboxes today, it’s more important than ever to create and send out effective marketing emails.

B2B Email Marketing Best Practices

• Write enticing subject lines. Think about your email subject lines as a Netflix trailer — if you can’t hook your audience with a two-minute clip (or, in this case, a few dozen characters), don’t expect them to open and watch (or read) the whole thing. We recommend spending almost as much time on your email subject lines as you do on the emails themselves.
• Stick to one call-to-action (CTA) per email. If you think the number of emails you receive is a lot, take a look at the CTAs in those emails … some are packed with two, three, and sometimes up to 10 different CTAs. Don’t make this mistake, which can leave your recipients’ heads spinning, asking “What should I click on first?” and ultimately clicking on nothing. With one CTA per email, you allow your audience to focus on your email content and ultimately one action … a welcome reprieve from today’s frequent decision-making and analysis paralysis.
• Segment your email to reach the most relevant audience. Not every email you send will be appropriate for everyone on your list. Your subscribers may be at different stages of the buyer’s journey or be seeking different solutions. That’s where email list segmentation comes into play. Not only does this help you relate to your audience better, but it gives your emails that personal feel that says “Hey, I’m listening and I know what you’d like to see.” Consumers prefer email quality over quantity anytime.
• Make sure your email designs are responsive. Over 80% of email users access their inbox on their phones, and emails that don’t show up correctly on mobile devices are often deleted in three seconds. Ouch. Don’t let your email be one of those.
• Don’t be afraid of the cold email. As uncomfortable as it is, the right email can convert new customers — like this cold sales email that won 16 new B2B customers.

👉🏼HubSpot Tip: You can’t send marketing emails without any recipients — these people make up your lists. There are plenty of easy ways to grow your email list. Begin with opt-in forms on your website homepage, About page, and blog. Check out HubSpot’s Free Form Builder tool to get started.

B2B Digital Marketing

Every business, whether B2B or B2C should have a digital presence — which is comprised of paid ads, search engine optimization, a website, and any other place your B2B company is active online. Let’s walk through a handful of tactics that can strengthen your B2B digital marketing strategy.

Define your target audience

A strong B2B digital marketing strategy starts with defining your target audience, or buyer persona. This demographic and psychographic information will inform almost every other marketing activity thereafter, ensuring your content and digital material is absorbed by the right eyes and ears (and that no resources go to waste on your end).

Create your website

Secondly, digital marketing can’t quite function without an informative, engaging website. Over 80% of buyers visit a website before making a purchase. Moreover, since the typical B2B sales cycle often involves many key players (such as gatekeepers, decision makers, and other folks who have to buy into a purchase), websites are easy, straightforward ways for influencers to share information about your product or service.

Optimize your digital presence

Your website needs to be more than informative and engaging, though … it needs to be discoverable. You can do this with on-page SEO and technical SEO tactics. These include everything from image alt-text and meta descriptions (what your visitors can see) to structured data and site speed (what your visitors can’t see). Off-page SEO is also at play here, which refers to external linking strategies and social sharing — SEO tactics that take place off your website.

Run PPC campaigns

Finally, round out your digital presence with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, which allows you to get your content and brand in front of new audiences via search engines and other advertising platforms. I recommend maximizing your PPC investment by advertising more than your specific products or services — such as your brand personality, blog or social media content, or company tagline.

The best way to see an ROI from your paid ads is by 1) incorporating your buyer persona data and 2) boosting content that they can relate to. For example, it’s highly unlikely a brand new consumer who’s never heard of you is searching for your exact product. They may be searching for a location-based solution or product feature. To reach the greatest number of potential customers, pay to target relevant categories within your brand vs. promoting your product or services.

B2B Content Marketing

We’ve talked about how B2B customers are focused on expertise, driven by logic, and desire to be educated. What better marketing tool to satisfy these priorities than B2B content marketing?

Whereas a traditional PR marketing strategy interrupts a consumer’s day-to-day with promotional material, a content marketing strategy adds valuable information and informs the consumer — which is precisely what B2B customers are looking for. Not to mention that content marketing supports SEO efforts, which involves anticipating what your audience is searching for, helping them discover your website and content … and potentially converting them to customers.

It's important to note, content marketing is most effective when you align your content to various stages of the buyer's journey. As Jonathan Franchell, CEO and Founder of Ironpaper, points out: "Effective content in the awareness phase educates the buyer on their pain points."

"A frequent mistake B2B organizations make is educating the buyer on their own company, product, or service. The buyer isn't ready for that; they are just beginning to understand their problem."

Franchell adds, "Additionally, B2B companies should test content. Run a test on an incentive and vary the type of content - use a webinar, an eBook, or a video. Understand what format of content attracts the right types of buyers and measure it down to an individual human level."

Download our free guide and learn what topics convert at the highest rate with insight from 175,000 B2B & B2C blog posts.

In fact, 80% of business decision makers prefer to get information from an article than an ad. Knowing this, I’d say you should be putting the same (if not more) resources into your content marketing than your traditional advertising strategy.

Because the B2B buyer’s journey is slightly different than the B2C buyer’s journey (which has shorter sales cycles and fewer decision makers involved), the content you create for your B2B content marketing strategy may vary more than the content you’ve seen as a consumer yourself, as illustrated in the below graphic.

Before you start creating content, though, I recommend creating a business blog. (Don’t worry, growing your blog readership is easier than you think.) Your blog will house all the content you create and serve as a home-base for readers to visit and subscribe to.

B2B Social Media Marketing

Did you know that 75% of B2B buyers and 84% of C-Suite executives use social media when making a purchase? That’s right — social media marketing isn’t just for brands targeting individual consumers.

Many B2B companies struggle with social media marketing, though. It can be harder to use social media to connect with business customers, especially because (as we mentioned above) there’s typically a lengthier sales cycle and longer chain of command.

Honestly, B2B social media marketing might not be where you convert the greatest number of leads, and that’s OK. It likely comes into play near the beginning of your customers’ buyer’s journeys.

Social media is a powerful tool for building brand awareness, giving your company an online personality, and humanizing your business — all very powerful factors when it comes to marketing and connecting with potential customers. Like email marketing, social media is also a highly effective channel for sharing your content and enhancing your brand expertise, the latter of which we know B2B customers appreciate.

Overwhelmed by social media? Spend more time connecting with your followers with our time-saving suite of social tools.

While your social media accounts might not convert as frequently as your content or email marketing, they’re just as important. In this case, followers are just as valuable — you never know when they might convert to leads or customers.

👉🏼 HubSpot Tip: Why? Content shared by employee advocates receives over eight times more engagement than content shared by brands. So, involve your employees in your B2B social media marketing strategy. Encourage them to create their own social media channels and share about life at your company. Create a culture account (like our @HubSpotLife Instagram) to show what’s going on at work, not just what you’re selling. You never know — this might attract strong talent, too.

B2B Marketing Examples

A B2B marketing approach that works for one business may not work for another, but that’s not to say we can’t learn something from the pros. Here are four B2B marketing examples of businesses who did it right.

Email Marketing: Mattermark, Raise the Bar Newsletter

Raise the Bar is a daily digest newsletter from Mattermark that features insights from leaders in sales, marketing, and growth engineering. It’s hand-picked by Mattermark executives and easy to scan, which is valuable in a world of elaborate, complicated newsletters and daily digests.

This is a good example of B2B email marketing because Mattermark takes the time to educate their subscribers without blatantly selling to them. This action builds trust with their audience while also equipping them with everything they need to know to make a purchase and become a paying customer.

Digital Marketing: Maersk, Website Homepage

It’s nearly impossible to know the intent of everyone who lands on your website, but Maersk’s homepage design makes it easy for visitors to find their way around.

Source

By offering three main options (“Become a Customer,” “Access Your Account,” and “Start a Career”), Maersk clearly segments their audience and allows visitors to easily navigate to the site content that corresponds with their intent.

This small design tweak also helps Maersk build trust and authority within each of these niche audiences — potential customers, current customers, and even employees.

Content Marketing: LeadPages, Blog + Resources

LeadPages has been bootstrapped since its inception in 2012 … yet it hit over $16 million in revenue just three years later. Its owner attributes its rapid success to its content strategy, which makes it a great example of B2B content marketing.

Source

LeadPages produces many different types of content resources, such as a blog, customer stories, a podcast, and a webinar. The variety in these resources allows the company to reach customers where they are using the method that best resonates with them.

LeadPages offers a blog that covers themes such as A/B testing, lead generation, and other topics that relate to the product and brand, a weekly podcast that chats with everyday entrepreneurs, and even a definitive guide to landing pages, which equips its customers to properly use and optimize the LeadPages product — all for free.

Social Media Marketing: MailChimp, Instagram

Social media is an effective channel on which to engage with your audience. It’s also a fun place to post gorgeous graphics and show off your brand personality. On Instagram, MailChimp has excelled at both.

Source

Fewer than half of its Instagram posts have to do with email marketing or the MailChimp product, but the MailChimp team always finds a way to make the posts relevant to its audience and followers — all while featuring fun, engaging, on-brand graphics and videos.

MailChimp also uses its Instagram to feature real customer stories and testimonials, which can have a big impact on potential consumers in the Consideration and Decision stages. Finally, MailChimp makes use of a took called LinkinBio, which allows Instagram users to click-through to its homepage or other digital content (since Instagram doesn’t offer live links on its platform). This creates a clear conversion path for consumers who discover or research MailChimp on Instagram and want to learn more on its website.

Invest in B2B Marketing and Reach Your Business Customers

Marketing isn’t effective unless you keep your audience in mind, and no other audience is as fickle and critical as business customers. Your marketing should communicate how your business can help theirs … and if it doesn’t, you may as well not be marketing at all.

Use these tips and strategies to understand your B2B audience, round out your buyer personas, and effectively use B2B marketing strategies that reach them. When you’re focused on your audience, your marketing will do the same.

from Marketing https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/b2b-marketing

Effective marketing is difficult to get right. Between creative demands, budget limits, and channel decisions, marketers have a lot to juggle when developing their marketing strategy.

The biggest determinant of effective marketing, however, is your audience.

If you’re not properly targeting your buyer persona, your promotions and advertisements will likely fall on deaf ears. You might as well not be marketing at all.

Where target audiences vary the most, though, is between individual consumers and businesses. Some companies serve individual shoppers, while others cater to companies and organizations.

Marketing to businesses is very different than marketing to individual consumers. That’s why an entirely different marketing method — B2B marketing — exists, and that’s why we built this guide. By the end of this article, you’ll have a better understanding of B2B marketing, the most effective B2B marketing strategies, and how you can tap into and convert your business audience.

HubSpot is an example of a company that engages in B2B marketing. HubSpot’s customers are other businesses, not individual consumers. Therefore, all of our marketing efforts can be classified as B2B.

B2B vs B2C Marketing

B2B and B2C (business-to-consumer) marketing are very different. B2B and B2C marketing differ in their respective strategies and applications, as well as in their audiences and how they communicate to them.

B2B marketing targets the needs, interests, and challenges of individuals who are making purchases on behalf of, or for, their organization (rather than for themselves), thus making the organization the customer. Here are a few examples of B2B companies:

• A coworking space that leases office spaces to remote teams and freelancers (like WeWork)
• An on-demand order fulfillment, warehousing, and screen printing service (like Printful)
• A marketing software company that sells social media management tools, lead generation software, and other marketing tools to businesses and organizations (like HubSpot!)

B2C marketing targets the needs, interests, and challenges of individual consumers who are making purchases on behalf of, or for, themselves, thus making the individual the customer. Here are a few examples of B2C companies:

• An e-commerce company that sells office supplies to remote or self-employed individuals (like Poppin)
• A store that sells t-shirts and other clothing and accessories (like Target)
• A music platform that sells streaming subscriptions (like Spotify)

Take a look at this chart comparing B2B and B2C customers.

	for b2b marketing	for b2c marketing
Goal	Customers are focused on ROI, efficiency, and expertise.	Customers are seeking deals and entertainment (which means marketing needs to be more fun).
Purchase Motivation	Customers are driven by logic and financial incentive.	Customers are driven by emotion.
Drivers	Customers want to be educated (which is where B2B content marketing comes in).	Customers appreciate education but don’t always need it to make a purchase decision.
Purchase Process	Customers like (if not prefer) to work with account managers and salespeople.	Customers like to make purchases directly.
People Involved in Purchase	Customers often have to confer with decision makers and other members of their chain of command before making a purchase decision.	Customers rarely need to confer with others before making a purchase decision.
Purchase Purpose	Customers make purchases for long-term solutions, resulting in a longer sales cycle, longer contracts, and longer relationships with companies.	Customers aren’t necessarily looking for long-term solutions or long-term relationships.

As much as they differ, though, B2B and B2C also intersect in many ways. While Poppin sells office supplies to remote or self-employed individuals, they also design corporate office spaces and branded supplies. On the flip side, Printful not only offers order fulfillment and warehousing to businesses; they also fill e-commerce printing orders for individuals.

As distinct as the B2B and B2C marketing audiences can be, B2B marketers can always learn from B2C campaigns, too.

B2B Marketing Strategies

As I said above, marketing depends on its audience. While B2B and B2C marketing vary, not every piece of B2B marketing material is alike, either.

In this section, we’ll talk about various B2B marketing strategies you can implement to reach your specific business audience. Before we dive in, though, make sure you understand the B2B buyer’s journey. Take note of how each of these stages may affect your marketing strategies and how you implement them.

B2B Email Marketing

Email marketing is a tried and true method of reaching both individual consumers and business customers. Did you know that 93% of B2B marketers use email? Are you one of them? You should be. Emails lead to engagement which turns subscribers into leads … and then customers.

Download our guide to optimizing email marketing for conversions and learn how to grow your email list, ensure deliverability, and increase engagement.

Unlike B2C customers who respond best to emotions and entertainment, B2B customers look for logic and positive ROI. Essentially, they’re asking themselves, How can your business help my business grow? Because of this, your email marketing must consistently resonate with your business customers and focus on things that matter to them — like time, money, and resources.

Email marketing is also a powerful vehicle for sharing your brand’s content. 83% of B2B companies use email newsletters as part of their content marketing program, and 40% of B2B marketers say these newsletters are most critical to their content marketing success.

With the constant barrage of emails flooding our inboxes today, it’s more important than ever to create and send out effective marketing emails.

B2B Email Marketing Best Practices

• Write enticing subject lines. Think about your email subject lines as a Netflix trailer — if you can’t hook your audience with a two-minute clip (or, in this case, a few dozen characters), don’t expect them to open and watch (or read) the whole thing. We recommend spending almost as much time on your email subject lines as you do on the emails themselves.
• Stick to one call-to-action (CTA) per email. If you think the number of emails you receive is a lot, take a look at the CTAs in those emails … some are packed with two, three, and sometimes up to 10 different CTAs. Don’t make this mistake, which can leave your recipients’ heads spinning, asking “What should I click on first?” and ultimately clicking on nothing. With one CTA per email, you allow your audience to focus on your email content and ultimately one action … a welcome reprieve from today’s frequent decision-making and analysis paralysis.
• Segment your email to reach the most relevant audience. Not every email you send will be appropriate for everyone on your list. Your subscribers may be at different stages of the buyer’s journey or be seeking different solutions. That’s where email list segmentation comes into play. Not only does this help you relate to your audience better, but it gives your emails that personal feel that says “Hey, I’m listening and I know what you’d like to see.” Consumers prefer email quality over quantity anytime.
• Make sure your email designs are responsive. Over 80% of email users access their inbox on their phones, and emails that don’t show up correctly on mobile devices are often deleted in three seconds. Ouch. Don’t let your email be one of those.
• Don’t be afraid of the cold email. As uncomfortable as it is, the right email can convert new customers — like this cold sales email that won 16 new B2B customers.

👉🏼HubSpot Tip: You can’t send marketing emails without any recipients — these people make up your lists. There are plenty of easy ways to grow your email list. Begin with opt-in forms on your website homepage, About page, and blog. Check out HubSpot’s Free Form Builder tool to get started.

B2B Digital Marketing

Every business, whether B2B or B2C should have a digital presence — which is comprised of paid ads, search engine optimization, a website, and any other place your B2B company is active online. Let’s walk through a handful of tactics that can strengthen your B2B digital marketing strategy.

Define your target audience

A strong B2B digital marketing strategy starts with defining your target audience, or buyer persona. This demographic and psychographic information will inform almost every other marketing activity thereafter, ensuring your content and digital material is absorbed by the right eyes and ears (and that no resources go to waste on your end).

Create your website

Secondly, digital marketing can’t quite function without an informative, engaging website. Over 80% of buyers visit a website before making a purchase. Moreover, since the typical B2B sales cycle often involves many key players (such as gatekeepers, decision makers, and other folks who have to buy into a purchase), websites are easy, straightforward ways for influencers to share information about your product or service.

Optimize your digital presence

Your website needs to be more than informative and engaging, though … it needs to be discoverable. You can do this with on-page SEO and technical SEO tactics. These include everything from image alt-text and meta descriptions (what your visitors can see) to structured data and site speed (what your visitors can’t see). Off-page SEO is also at play here, which refers to external linking strategies and social sharing — SEO tactics that take place off your website.

Run PPC campaigns

Finally, round out your digital presence with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, which allows you to get your content and brand in front of new audiences via search engines and other advertising platforms. I recommend maximizing your PPC investment by advertising more than your specific products or services — such as your brand personality, blog or social media content, or company tagline.

The best way to see an ROI from your paid ads is by 1) incorporating your buyer persona data and 2) boosting content that they can relate to. For example, it’s highly unlikely a brand new consumer who’s never heard of you is searching for your exact product. They may be searching for a location-based solution or product feature. To reach the greatest number of potential customers, pay to target relevant categories within your brand vs. promoting your product or services.

B2B Content Marketing

We’ve talked about how B2B customers are focused on expertise, driven by logic, and desire to be educated. What better marketing tool to satisfy these priorities than B2B content marketing?

Whereas a traditional PR marketing strategy interrupts a consumer’s day-to-day with promotional material, a content marketing strategy adds valuable information and informs the consumer — which is precisely what B2B customers are looking for. Not to mention that content marketing supports SEO efforts, which involves anticipating what your audience is searching for, helping them discover your website and content … and potentially converting them to customers.

It's important to note, content marketing is most effective when you align your content to various stages of the buyer's journey. As Jonathan Franchell, CEO and Founder of Ironpaper, points out: "Effective content in the awareness phase educates the buyer on their pain points."

"A frequent mistake B2B organizations make is educating the buyer on their own company, product, or service. The buyer isn't ready for that; they are just beginning to understand their problem."

Franchell adds, "Additionally, B2B companies should test content. Run a test on an incentive and vary the type of content - use a webinar, an eBook, or a video. Understand what format of content attracts the right types of buyers and measure it down to an individual human level."

Download our free guide and learn what topics convert at the highest rate with insight from 175,000 B2B & B2C blog posts.

In fact, 80% of business decision makers prefer to get information from an article than an ad. Knowing this, I’d say you should be putting the same (if not more) resources into your content marketing than your traditional advertising strategy.

Because the B2B buyer’s journey is slightly different than the B2C buyer’s journey (which has shorter sales cycles and fewer decision makers involved), the content you create for your B2B content marketing strategy may vary more than the content you’ve seen as a consumer yourself, as illustrated in the below graphic.

Before you start creating content, though, I recommend creating a business blog. (Don’t worry, growing your blog readership is easier than you think.) Your blog will house all the content you create and serve as a home-base for readers to visit and subscribe to.

B2B Social Media Marketing

Did you know that 75% of B2B buyers and 84% of C-Suite executives use social media when making a purchase? That’s right — social media marketing isn’t just for brands targeting individual consumers.

Many B2B companies struggle with social media marketing, though. It can be harder to use social media to connect with business customers, especially because (as we mentioned above) there’s typically a lengthier sales cycle and longer chain of command.

Honestly, B2B social media marketing might not be where you convert the greatest number of leads, and that’s OK. It likely comes into play near the beginning of your customers’ buyer’s journeys.

Social media is a powerful tool for building brand awareness, giving your company an online personality, and humanizing your business — all very powerful factors when it comes to marketing and connecting with potential customers. Like email marketing, social media is also a highly effective channel for sharing your content and enhancing your brand expertise, the latter of which we know B2B customers appreciate.

Overwhelmed by social media? Spend more time connecting with your followers with our time-saving suite of social tools.

While your social media accounts might not convert as frequently as your content or email marketing, they’re just as important. In this case, followers are just as valuable — you never know when they might convert to leads or customers.

👉🏼 HubSpot Tip: Why? Content shared by employee advocates receives over eight times more engagement than content shared by brands. So, involve your employees in your B2B social media marketing strategy. Encourage them to create their own social media channels and share about life at your company. Create a culture account (like our @HubSpotLife Instagram) to show what’s going on at work, not just what you’re selling. You never know — this might attract strong talent, too.

B2B Marketing Examples

A B2B marketing approach that works for one business may not work for another, but that’s not to say we can’t learn something from the pros. Here are four B2B marketing examples of businesses who did it right.

Email Marketing: Mattermark, Raise the Bar Newsletter

Raise the Bar is a daily digest newsletter from Mattermark that features insights from leaders in sales, marketing, and growth engineering. It’s hand-picked by Mattermark executives and easy to scan, which is valuable in a world of elaborate, complicated newsletters and daily digests.

This is a good example of B2B email marketing because Mattermark takes the time to educate their subscribers without blatantly selling to them. This action builds trust with their audience while also equipping them with everything they need to know to make a purchase and become a paying customer.

Digital Marketing: Maersk, Website Homepage

It’s nearly impossible to know the intent of everyone who lands on your website, but Maersk’s homepage design makes it easy for visitors to find their way around.

Source

By offering three main options (“Become a Customer,” “Access Your Account,” and “Start a Career”), Maersk clearly segments their audience and allows visitors to easily navigate to the site content that corresponds with their intent.

This small design tweak also helps Maersk build trust and authority within each of these niche audiences — potential customers, current customers, and even employees.

Content Marketing: LeadPages, Blog + Resources

LeadPages has been bootstrapped since its inception in 2012 … yet it hit over $16 million in revenue just three years later. Its owner attributes its rapid success to its content strategy, which makes it a great example of B2B content marketing.

Source

LeadPages produces many different types of content resources, such as a blog, customer stories, a podcast, and a webinar. The variety in these resources allows the company to reach customers where they are using the method that best resonates with them.

LeadPages offers a blog that covers themes such as A/B testing, lead generation, and other topics that relate to the product and brand, a weekly podcast that chats with everyday entrepreneurs, and even a definitive guide to landing pages, which equips its customers to properly use and optimize the LeadPages product — all for free.

Social Media Marketing: MailChimp, Instagram

Social media is an effective channel on which to engage with your audience. It’s also a fun place to post gorgeous graphics and show off your brand personality. On Instagram, MailChimp has excelled at both.

Source

Fewer than half of its Instagram posts have to do with email marketing or the MailChimp product, but the MailChimp team always finds a way to make the posts relevant to its audience and followers — all while featuring fun, engaging, on-brand graphics and videos.

MailChimp also uses its Instagram to feature real customer stories and testimonials, which can have a big impact on potential consumers in the Consideration and Decision stages. Finally, MailChimp makes use of a took called LinkinBio, which allows Instagram users to click-through to its homepage or other digital content (since Instagram doesn’t offer live links on its platform). This creates a clear conversion path for consumers who discover or research MailChimp on Instagram and want to learn more on its website.

Invest in B2B Marketing and Reach Your Business Customers

Marketing isn’t effective unless you keep your audience in mind, and no other audience is as fickle and critical as business customers. Your marketing should communicate how your business can help theirs … and if it doesn’t, you may as well not be marketing at all.

Use these tips and strategies to understand your B2B audience, round out your buyer personas, and effectively use B2B marketing strategies that reach them. When you’re focused on your audience, your marketing will do the same.

via Perfecte news Non connection