In this post, we’re sharing Kim Farwell’s presentation on “Where You’re Wasting Up To 50% Of Your Marketing Budget” and Rachel Foster’s presentation on “The Biggest B2B Content Marketing Mistakes”. 

Where You’re Wasting Up To 50% of Your Marketing Budget

Kim Farwell, Principal at InMark Solutions (@FarwellKim) focused on the 5 most common places where marketing budget is being wasted, and what you can do to stop it.

The Biggest B2B Content Marketing Mistakes

Rachel Foster, B2B Copywriter at Fresh Perspective Copywriting (@copywriterTO) shared great advice about the do’s and don’ts of using content marketing to generate leads, shorten sales cycles and increase your ROI.

Attend the next Toronto B2B Marketers Meetup Event

Brainrider sponsors an ongoing series of peer networking and knowledge-sharing meetups designed exclusively for B2B marketers. During these, attendees can expect exciting guest speakers sharing their expertise and experiences in focused 20-minute presentations which are followed by an open networking session fueled by light munchies and beverages.

The next #torontoB2B Marketers Meetup is scheduled for Thursday, May 3^rd from 4:00PM to 7:00PM (ET) at:

Brainrider HQ
386 Huron Street (at Sussex) The Chelsea Shop
Toronto, Ontario
M5S 2G6, CA

Tickets are free but limited. Register here now, while seats are still available.

Visit our official event page for more information: http://torontob2b-6.eventbrite.ca

In case you haven’t yet noticed, we’re really enjoying our recent foray into webinars and live events. The engagement level in an event format is a breath of fresh air for all of us who are being overrun with written content about content marketing.

So in light of that, we’re excited to announce that we are co-presenting a new take on our popular Customer-Centric Content Clinic webinar with our new friends at Wistia – focused a bit more on B2B video content.

The live version of the Clinic happens at 2pm 1pm Eastern Time, Thursday April 19, 2012. You can register for it here. If you’d like to have your B2B video content reviewed live during the Clinic, email Bruno at Brainrider.

Ezra at Wistia has even convinced me to shoot some live video during the presentation so that their post-production wizards can try to edit together something a little more interesting for the recorded on-demand version that we’ll share with you after the fact, using footage from our Brainrider Toronto studio and the Wistia studio. So that should be fun.

If you aren’t yet familiar with Wistia, you soon will be. They offer a very unique marketer-centric video hosting and analytics platform that we have started experimenting with. Think YouTube or Vimeo, but built from the ground up for data-hungry marketers like all of us. Here’s a link to Wistia’s How It Works page.

To get you pumped for the B2B Video Content Clinic on the 19th, Wistia’s second-ever third-ever webinar, here’s the first-ever Wistia webinar: Introduction to Video Marketing.

Developing content that connects with both customer needs AND your value proposition ensures that you’ll not only generate engagement, but also be in a position to monetize that engagement.

We co-hosted a live online clinic with our friends at Pardot sharing Better Practice advice on how to develop customer-centric B2B marketing content. As part of the Clinic, we reviewed a number of company websites to see what they were doing well from a content perspective, and gave them some practical advice on how to get their content working harder for them.

The slides went up on Slideshare right after the live event, and this morning we have added a synced audio track so that you can play back the entire webinar on-demand. Here it is…

If you have a marketing automation solution like Pardot, Marketo, Eloqua, or similar, you already know that your website visitors consume your content in bursts of activity. If you didn’t yet know that, well, now you do.

Like most useful marketing insights, this makes complete logical sense. Yet for some reason, we often try to engineer nurturing and drip programs to methodically “keep in touch” or “keep leads warm”. We obsesses over figuring out which piece of content to send out, to which segment, at the perfect time interval and even time of day/day of week.

Think about the sites you visited today. Think about visiting this site. Relatively few of the people reading this article come to this site on a regularly scheduled basis to consume one piece of content. You come because you’re looking for something or it has been shared with you, and you most likely start snooping around a bit if this first content is relevant and useful. You may read some related articles, you may explore other sections, or you may even check out our products and services. Our visitors average 3-4 pages per visit. Then you leave, and if we do our job well, you come back again in the future and do it all again.

In this context of content consumption bursts, our nurturing objectives as marketers are really twofold:

1. Extend the length of every burst.

Try using activity-triggered nurturing tactics like these:

• Cross-links from each content asset to other related content
• Related content suggestions (we call them “What Next?” links) on thank-you pages for successful form completions
• Related content suggestions in auto-responder emails that you send to deliver download links, event registration confirmations, etc.
• A customer-centric content organization/categorization/navigation structure that makes it easy to browse and explore your resources

2. Reactivate leads in your database into new bursts.

This is where more typical timed nurturing tactics come into play:

• Regularly scheduled outbound emails with lots of content options that let leads “choose their own adventure”
• Time-delayed outbound emails that reach out to leads who haven’t visited your site for a set period of time (we typically use 30 days)
• Online advertising through a retargeting service, with specific calls to action and content offers for unconverted visitors
• Consider placing content offers and calls to action in other non-marketing outbound channels like email signatures, invoices and statements, phone IVR recorded messages, etc.

What other lead nurturing tactics do you use to extend the length of a burst or reactivate leads into new bursts?

Wistia specializes in hosting web video for businesses.  They store your video securely in the cloud and serve it up however you like, any time, anywhere, on any device, — with trackability! In this guest post, Ezra Fishman looks at getting better program results with embedded calls to action:

When designing a webpage or an email blast we’ve all been coached by the marketing gurus to include a Call to Action (CTA) to help guide the behavior of our audience.  So why don’t we do the same thing with video?  We at Wistia think you should!

A captive audience

A viewer that reaches the end of one of your videos should be treated like a prized possession.   By completing the video, this individual has indicated that he/she is interested in you and your content.  Better still, you have a unique insight into this prospect’s frame of mind because you know exactly what content they have just consumed.  Combined, these factors make the end of the video a ripe opportunity to interact with some of your most engaged leads.

A missed opportunity

Do you have a video on your website?  If so, what happens when the video ends?  If you’re like the vast majority of companies your videos end with a fade to black, a company logo or maybe a “Replay” button.  This leaves your engaged prospect on his own to wander you site and find the next most interesting thing that catches his eye.   Worse still, if your video is hosted by someone like YouTube it likely ends with a list of “related videos” that now draw your prospect’s attention further afield from you and your product – possibly even encouraging him to leave your site altogether and check out more videos elsewhere!

These are definitely not the calls to action most of us would design if we could control it.

Picking your video CTA

The first step in implementing an effective video CTA is deciding exactly what you would like viewers to do when they finish the video.  The content and location of the video should help you determine this action.  If your video is a customer testimonial a natural call to action would be “See Pricing” or “Start Free Trial”.  On the other hand, if your video is a resource in your Knowledge Center a CTA pointing to other resources or a newsletter signup may be more appropriate.

Building your video CTA

Once you’ve decided where you want viewers to head after the video, the task is now building the actual CTA.  Video CTA’s come in many shapes and sizes with a pretty wide range in functionality.  Below we outline the two most popular forms – passive CTAs and dynamic CTAs.

Passive CTAs

For most businesses the most accessible solution is to put a passive CTA directly into the video.  A passive CTA is simply a message that appears during the video that encourages the viewer to take a next step.  This message could be spoken during the video – “Give me a call to talk more” – or it could be a visual element such as a graphic at the end of the video.

The advantage of these CTAs is that you don’t need any extra tools, development or custom solutions to implement them.  If your video currently ends with a fade to black, we highly recommend trying out this simple solution.

Dynamic CTAs

A more advanced solution is to build a dynamic CTA that allows a user to navigate directly to the next step.  These clickable CTAs remove barriers for your viewer taking action and therefore significantly improve conversion rates.  The challenge with dynamic CTAs is that they can be difficult to create without assistance.  Below are few options if you’re looking to build dynamic CTAs.

Here at Wistia, we recently launched a new tool to customize videos prior to embedding them on your site.  Among other things, this tool allows marketers to add a dynamic CTA to a video by simply typing in text and specifying a link.  When the video ends, this message is shown and a click navigates the viewer to the page you choose.  See the video below for an example of these custom CTAs.

Another option for creating a dynamic CTA is putting your video in a popover that includes a CTA element.  The advantage of this method is that the element is visible for the viewer to click throughout the whole video and after the video ends.  This is gives a viewer the opportunity to take the next action without waiting for the video to finish, while also not distracting attention away from the content for viewers interested in the full video.

The final option for creating video CTAs is to use the annotations made popular by YouTube.  The annotations are dynamic elements that pop up during the video and serve as CTAs.  This solution is ideal for non-profit organizations because YouTube allows these links to go directly to your own website – for everyone else the links can only send viewers to destinations on YouTube making it less valuable as a CTA.

Overall the key to making great video CTAs is recognizing the value of an engaged viewer and considering what you would like them to do after watching the video.  Then all you have to do is figure out a way to make that next step the default option for your audience – that’s what CTAs are all about!

For more resources on video CTAs see the resources below:

http://sporkmarketing.com/blog/178/online-video-marketing-tracking-calls-to-action/

http://www.netwitsthinktank.com/marketing-and-communication/add-calls-to-action-to-your-nonprofit-youtube-videos.htm

http://wistia.com/blog/smooth-playback-calls-to-action/