If you are looking for marketing advice, you don’t need to look very far. There are literally hundreds of marketing blogs, websites and platform vendors who offer up various levels of expertise and advice. So no matter whether you are an enterprise marketer or running your own business, you’ll easily find some ideas, strategies and systems that will help you activate your plans. BUT the question remains – with an abundance of information, who do you trust?
It’s often tempting to look beyond your usual marketing consultants or agencies for new ideas. But facts can be skewed or reported from a number of angles, and the grass really can appear greener when pitched the right way.
The challenge for marketers is to look beyond the facts and figures to understand the shifts and movements that are taking place. We need to look for the underlying behaviours that explain the facts and map this to our own businesses in a meaningful way.
Now, I have believed for some time that quality content is a fundamental requirement for successful marketing programs. But in the shift to digital, this need has been amplified – after all, we are know for what we produce. No content = no presence.
So in many ways this infographic from inbound marketing platform vendor Optify confirms my thinking – that organic search (and therefore content) is the most powerful driver of traffic to B2B websites. They analysed 62 million website visits, 215 million page views and over 350,000 leads from small and mid-sized US businesses to identify the trends in B2B marketing in 2012.
BUT the question remains? Does this ring true for your business? Does it match to your experience? And what are the movements that you are observing in your customer base? That’s where you should be looking.
