Explore Your Competitors’ Most Valuable Content

Explore Your Competitors’ Most Valuable Content

As marketers, we need to tell stories, a whole bunch of stories to our audience. But what should all these stories be about? What things should we write about?

I love this part of the research, as it makes my life as a marketer so much better. With the following strategies, you will be able to find out what content your competition creates is getting a lot of engagement.

No more guessing what type of content works.

I am using BuzzSumo (free) and Ahrefs (paid) for this research.

Head over to BuzzSumo and under the “most shared” tab, enter the domain of your competition into the search bar. In this case, we’re using “hubspot.com”.

With a free version of the app, you’ll be able to see their top 5 most shared pieces of content, filtered by date, language, and content type.

Now, just document your competition’s best content.

Advanced Techniques For Content Marketing Research

If you are more serious about content marketing, you should also check the backlinks (referring domains) that these articles get.

You want to check their referring domains to know if their audience is referring this content as a resourceful piece of content or not.

Here is how to do it using Ahrefs, and their content explorer feature.

Now you know what your competition’s most shared and most referred articles are.

What might be next?

Let’s see where and who they share these articles with so that we can outreach and share our content with them too, thereby getting targeted traffic and providing quality content.

Let’s take this article by HubSpot, 42 Visual Content Marketing Statistics You Should Know in 2017. They got 4.9K shares on LinkedIn and over 1.8K referring domains.

Using Ahrefs, you’ll be able to download all the backlinks and filter by domain ranking.

As a next step, you’ll be outreaching to these domains with your own content and trying to get links back to your site for SEO and targeted traffic.

BuzzSumo and Ahrefs are brilliant tools that we use in our arsenal here at MAN Digital. These are the kinds of in-depth pieces of research we do with our clients. If you would like us to build this for you, please don’t hesitate to let us know here.

Spy On Your Competitors’ Advertising Strategies And Systems

Are you ready for more?

Let’s dive into some even more advanced spying.

In this section, we will be using a few free Chrome add-on tools like Ghostery and BuiltWith, and some enterprise tools such as Adbeat and WhatRunsWhere for advanced online marketers.

First things first.

We want to know if our competitors are using any paid ads or doing any remarketing.

First, we’ll install Chrome apps Ghostery and BuiltWith.

Now head over to your competitor’s domain and check this icon :

Click on it and you’ll see all the trackers that this domain is using. In HubSpot’s case, they use a bunch of them.

I check for obvious things like:

Are they doing Remarketing?

For this, I check Facebook Custom Audiences and AdRoll.

Are they using AdWords? Or DoubleClick?

What CRM are they using? (Obviously, in this case, they are using HubSpot.)

Do they have Google Tag Manager installed or not?

This way, I can decide if they are serious about online paid advertising or not.

OK, now with BuiltWith.com, you’ll be able the check the same but with more details.

Look at the advertising, analytics, and tracking sections.

I might also look at their hosting providers. If I see any low-cost hosting providers like Namecheap, GoDaddy, Bluehost, or HostGator, I just note them down and take it as a sign that they don’t have big online marketing budgets (but this is just an assumption).

Advanced Techniques For Uncovering The Online Advertising Strategies Of Your Competition

In this section, we will be using advanced tools to uncover our competitors’ online advertising strategies.

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• Which display, video, and Facebook ads they are using
• Where they send their ads traffic, and to which landing pages
• Which websites they place their ads on – their placements
• Which ad networks they are using[/ht_message]

To do this, we’ll use Adbeat (expensive), WhatRunsWhere (expensive), SEMRush, and AdEspresso.

Disclaimer: some of these tools are enterprise-level pieces of software with costs starting from $200 a month.

See the video below for these advanced techniques.

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Get More Insights Into Your Audience’s Voice And How To Create Your Copy

This part is neglected most of the time by many business owners, as it is considered too fluffy.

We want to know what voice is used by our audience, what they are asking online, and what reviews they have written about your competitors or market.

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I use 3 main sources for this:

1. Business review sites to see what voice is being used by my audience.
2. Amazon Books in my niche, where I look at book reviews and tables of content to see what questions are being answered in these books.
3. Reddit or Quora to see what my customers’ FAQs are.

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I want to find out the following:

• Are these customers satisfied with the value received for the money they have paid?
• What features do they like the most?
• What features are they missing?
• What are the main benefits of using the product?
• What are the most used keywords appearing in the reviews?
• What are the tables of content like in speciality books? What questions do the authors want to answer?
• How are the forewords written in these books?
• What are the most FAQs of my audience?

Research Your Audience’s Business Needs On Niche Review Sites

The first step I take is to research websites that review similar products or services to mine, or have the same audience that I target.

For example, I implement Marketing Automation for Small Businesses, therefore, I would like to know the kinds of feedback provided by different marketing automation software users.

For SaaS, I use:

• Capterra
• G2 Crowd
• TrustRadius

I would look into marketing automation software companies that have a lot of reviews on these platforms and copy the reviews.

On Capterra, they focus a lot on Pros and Cons, so I usually start with this one.

Try to avoid comments like “I love the team at HubSpot”; focus on comments that talk about benefits and case studies.

Things like:

When supplying an automated campaign workflow for a client, they had difficulties getting to grips with the old workflow, as it was complex to look at and figure out how to use. Now it looks much cleaner, intuitive, and easy to use, so I can’t wait to show the client! [Source: Capterra]

Works well with social for posting and listening. The blog performance is good too. [Source: G2 Crowd]

It was good when we were a company with less than 25 employees, but as soon as you want to scale, HubSpot cannot handle it. [Source: G2 Crowd]

This last review (which would need to be validated by more reviews) helps me understand that if I were to target HubSpot users, my focus would be SMBs and I would need to concentrate on building my persona based on this.

These comments can help me to write better content, and write my answers to all sorts of objections like these ones.

We carry out comprehensive research into the reviews written about our copywriters or anyone else in the team writing copy, so that we understand clients’ objections, their voice, concerns, and satisfaction with using the product/service.

To visually see the bigger picture in terms of the words most used in reviews, I create a tag cloud using tagul.com.

I made a tag cloud using HubSpot reviews. You’ll get something like this.

Of course, the more reviews you add, the more accurate your tag cloud will be.

Research Niche Books, Quora, And Reddit To Build Better Content

I use this strategy to create better landing page content, blog posts, and online ads.

For this strategy, I research books on Amazon and Blinkist.

Check out the video below to learn how I do it.

1. Search for books using services/products as search strings.
2. Look inside one of the books.
3. Check its table of content and its foreword, and then look for patterns in how chapter titles are constructed.
4. Determine the book’s main ideas and jot them down in your Evernote for future inspiration.
5. Check a few of the book’s reviews, as these can often also be a very good source of inspiration for finding answers to potential questions.

Note down any chapter titles and book reviews you like, as these will come in handy later on when you’ll be looking for ideas for creating your content.

I also use Blinkist in much the same way as I use Amazon.

The Blinkist team writes summaries about the most important points covered in mainstream books. I love Blinkist as you can also listen to these books, they have a very easy to understand structure, and the site helps me to understand the main messages that authors want to convey.

Question-and-answer sites are excellent for getting traffic, as well as for researching your audience. Carry out some preliminary research on Quora and Reddit and check if people are looking for the answers to questions you might want to cover.

Note down any FAQs.

Check the answers some companies have provided; many of them will have pitched their product and service. This can serve as inspiration for your own copy and for understanding the voice of your audience.

Conclusions

Always carry out comprehensive research on your audience and competition and have multiple sources of information.

Start with Alexa and SimilarWeb to understand their traffic statistics and sources, and use SpyFu and SEMRush to look into the keywords that help your competition to get organic and paid traffic.

Facebook Audience Insights, Twitter Audience Insights, and Google Analytics will help you to understand the demographics of your audience. You’ll be able to see a lot of valuable data and build your buyer persona based on this.

Carry out in-depth analyses on their content marketing using tools like BuzzSumo and Ahrefs.

To find out more about the voice of your audience so that you can build better content, use book reviews and summaries, research their writing style, as well as using Q&A sites and specific sites that review similar products or services to yours (i.e. G2 Crowd and Capterra for SaaS businesses).

Learn more How To Generate and Nurture More B2B Leads from our Playbook!

Read more on our blog MAN Digital Blog

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How To Do Market And Competitor Analysis For Your B2B Business

Now that you know the trends of digital marketing for 2017, let’s start the research.

This part is very important for the success of your marketing campaign, as you want to gather as much knowledge about your competitors as you can and reverse engineer what they do with their own online marketing.

I will be showing you free and paid tools. Obviously, if you are using premium tools you’ll gather more data, but you’ll be able to get a bunch of good and valuable data with free tools as well.

It is very important that you document your research along the way.

Here’s a video about this whole chapter in case you don’t like reading.

• We’ll use the Follow.net chrome extension and SimilarWeb to learn more about the monthly traffic of our competition.
• Use Alexa.com to gather more information on the demographics and the geography of their traffic.
• We’ll look at SEMrush and Alexa to see their top pages and if they have any paid traffic.
• We’ll also take a look at iSpionage and SpyFu to check their advertising budget on PPC.
• Use Adbeat or WhatRunsWhere to see their display ads, placements, ad networks, and even their landing pages – these are high value, amazing tools if you want to save money on your advertising budget.
• Find out what your competition’s most shared and read content is online by using BuzzSumo.
• Use AdEspresso to check profitable Facebook ads and advanced techniques to uncover any online advertiser strategies.
• Use BuiltWith to check what technology they use to build their website and track their visitors.

Before we get started, open Notepad or Evernote (my preferred note app). Here is a template I made in Evernote that you could use to organise the data that you gather.

Traffic Statistics And Traffic Source Data Of Your Competitors

Head to Follow.net and create a free account. You don’t need a paid account for now.

Follow.net is an excellent free research tool that gathers data from many different sources from the Internet and presents it at a glance.

In our example we will be doing research on Hubspot.com.

After you have created a free account, type your competitors’ domains into the URL search bar and make notes in your chosen Notepad on the monthly traffic sections.

Follow.net will gather data from SimilarWeb and Quantcast regarding traffic statistics, but be aware that all of these are just rough estimates and different tools might show different data.

You’ll also get their last 3 months’ traffic sources.

If you want to know more about each source, head over to Similarweb.com and enter the domain to find out, for example, in Social, which social network brings them the most traffic, or which links bring the majority of their traffic to the site.

If you have a premium account with SimilarWeb, you can go into even more detail and check the last month only, and go over all the links that bring traffic to your competition.

This is a very valuable insight, as you could go out and build a relationship with the same site to drive targeted traffic to your website.

At MAN Digital, we do such in-depth analyses using SimilarWeb Pro, so just ping us here if you want me to do a free competitor analysis using SimilarWeb Pro.

One very interesting thing we can see with SimilarWeb Pro is its traffic channel analysis.

In HubSpot’s example, we can see that Hubspot.com had 4.47% of its traffic coming from emails in March 2016, and starting in April, they tripled this number up to 13% by July 2016. This is a huge change when you have 15M visitors a month.

We’ve just discovered an interesting insight about HubSpot traffic generation: they started to focus more on email marketing in April 2016.

I can actually vouch for this as I subscribe to their newsletters, and I started to get more content marketing emails from them. Emails like these:

If HubSpot is one of your competitors (which I would not like to have), hop over to their site and subscribe to all their newsletters to see what email marketing campaigns they use.

Demographics And Geography Insights

Now that we know about their traffic, let’s get more data on their demographics. I just love this tool from Amazon. In my view, it is the best research tool out there, just because Amazon has some data that nobody has at the moment (OK, except for maybe Google).

Just get a free trial on Alexa.com, gather the data, and cancel the subscription before they charge your card; 14 days is more than enough time to gather initial data.

In Alexa, I like to take the global rank of the website just to keep track of who is the best ranked by Alexa among my competitors.

Then we’ve got the geography and demographics, which is my favourite feature of Alexa.

Here is how it would look:

The most important pieces of data for me are Gender, Age, Browsing Location, and Education. I usually make a screenshot of this data and put it in the Evernote along with the other data I have collected.

I also carry out more research on their demographics in Facebook Audience Insights. Just to double check the demographics.

Here is how I do it:

Go to Facebook Audience Insights, select the country you want to analyse, enter your competitor into the interest section (step 2) in the picture below, and select the demographics.

 

A very interesting section in Audience Insights is the Lifestyle one, which is only available for the US market though. It is a household-level consumer segmentation and visualisation suite by Acxiom. The life stage clustering system is called PersonicX.

Find out more here, where you’ll find a very detailed report about what each cluster means.

 

Besides this, you have information about their relationship status and education.

Why do I insist on this? 

If you understand the cluster you will understand the customer avatar much better, so you will be able to customise content more easily and create better products and services for your potential clients.

Next, go to the “Page Likes” tab, where you will be able to see what other pages this audience likes. This information will help you to gain an even more in-depth understanding of the audience, as well as helping you to create an audience to target on Facebook Ads later on.

OPTIONAL

Great, now if you’re active on Twitter, you’ll be able to get some nice data about your followers and learn more about your audience.

Go to Twitter Analytics and choose Audiences. Here you’ll be able to see a very brief overview of your audience.

I am interested in gender, age, interests, buying behaviour, occupation, and devices used.

In my case, my Twitter audience is 71% male, and 42% are aged between 25 and 34.

If we take a look at occupation, the majority of my followers are technical professionals.

Obviously, they are interested in technology, tech news, and entrepreneurship.

In conclusion, my followers are predominantly male, between 25 and 34 years of age, and are technical professionals. Now, if I am comparing this with HubSpot’s data from Alexa and Facebook Insights, it is very similar.

Now you might say, OK but these people don’t visit my site. Let’s check that on Google Analytics.

Go onto your Google Analytics (GA), to Audience, and then Demographics > Overview.

Surprise, surprise: GA also shows similar age and gender statistics to Alexa, Facebook, and Twitter. Now our research is becoming more accurate.

Data from Google is just amazing and it can make our research so much easier. It is in Google’s interests at the end of the day, as we (marketers) will spend more on Adwords if we have more tools and targeting data.

If we look at Interests in Google Analytics (Audience > Interests > Overview), we can see that our audience’s interests are also similar to what we found using the other sources.

I could talk about Audience Insights for ages. I hope this information has helped you to understand how to gather data so that you can build your buyer persona.

If you have any other specific questions about this topic, please don’t hesitate to ask me them.

Organic and Paid Traffic Keywords Analysis

Why is this part important?

Let’s think a bit about the psychology of searching. Why do we search online?

Go to Spyfu.com; there’s no need to sign up to a premium account for now.

Enter your competitor’s domain and check both their organic and paid traffic keywords.

SpyFu is an amazing tool. They collect data, in this case for 10 years, and will estimate the monthly PPC traffic of your competitor.

OK, now, you will not be able to see all their keywords with a free account. This is when I would say that, if you’re on a tight budget, you should go over to Alexa.com and get a free 7-day trial to collect all the data about your competition.

How To Download All The Organic And Paid Keywords Of Your Competition

Go to Alexa.com/keywords (get a free 7-day trial for the advanced plan) and download both their organic and paid traffic keywords.

You will now have a full list of keywords your competition is targeting. The organic section will show you the percentage of search traffic that this website is getting monthly.

OK, now you know what keywords your competitor is targeting for paid ads and what they are building their organic traffic for, you have a very good insight into what products or services they are focusing on.

Document this data, as we will use it when we need to build content.

Learn more How To Generate and Nurture More B2B Leads from our Playbook!

Read more on our blog MAN Digital Blog

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B2B Digital Marketing Trends 2017

In our free 6-week long Marketing Automation Network course about B2B lead generation, I talked with Robert from Landingi about the digital marketing trends that will shape 2017. It is week 1 of a 6-week free intensive B2B lead generation video course series.

What we know for sure is that 2017 will be the year of the user experience around our customers.

By 2020, mobile will be the biggest online advertising market, with video growing the fastest, BI Intelligence estimates.

Here are our 7 marketing trends for 2017:

1. Video Marketing
2. Cross-device Usage
3. Personalisation
4. Niche Marketing
5. Mobile And Tablet Ads
6. Lead Generation
7. Influential Marketing

Video Marketing

We love entertainment, stories, and our mobile Internet bandwidth is getting faster, which is why video is getting more and more popular online.

Video ad spending grew +557% sequentially from Q2 2016 to Q3 2016, according to a recent report by Smaato.

This is crazy guys, +557%.

So, start making videos of your products and services before it’s too late.

Video doesn’t need to be hard, just make sure that you are using real stories, personal stories if possible, and that you are putting that little human touch into it.

Before you even touch video, make sure you have the right message to match your market.

Here are a few easy useful tips for leveraging video marketing.

• Use Facebook Live to make announcements, do webinars, and for blogging.
• Make short demo-videos of your products and services.
• Use Snapchat for daily tips – especially when you are attending conferences.
• Build compelling pre-roll ads on Youtube.
• Try out Instagram Video Ads – here is a simple explanation on how to build an Instagram video ad

Cross-device Usage

According to a study carried out by Ninthdecimal, retailers who use ad campaigns across several devices to engage with consumers experience higher rates of engagement and visits to their stores than those focusing on one device alone, such as just sticking with the traditional desktop computer, for example.

We already own multiple devices; we have iPhones, work and personal laptops, tablets, and even smart TVs. We might even have smart watches if we are geeky enough.

Luckily, we can leverage Facebook and Google’s technology to remarket to all of our audience on different devices.

TIP: “Start building remarketing campaigns on Facebook, Youtube, and Google. Be present on each of your audience’s devices and help guide the conversion.

When a cookie is placed onto your computer by an ad using SilverPush, an “audio beacon” is also emitted that can be detected by mobile devices in the vicinity that are also running SilverPush software.

They are therefore able to recognise that the same person owns these two devices. In an interview with TechCrunch, the CEO of SilverPush, Hitesh Chawla, explained that the biggest obstacle for this technology was distance.

So that they can achieve a more accurate understanding of their customers’ cross-device behaviour, marketing and tech companies are extremely keen on the idea of being able to identify and track their customers across multiple devices.

That way, they can tailor their advertising campaigns to their target audiences more effectively.

Mobile And Tablet: They Are A Must

Last year in Q4, mobile and tablet surpassed desktop Internet usage worldwide.

The percentage of ad impression is the same on mobile devices as it is on desktop.

If your website is not responsive yet, stop reading this, get yourself a web developer fast, and ask them to optimise your mobile website.

There’s no more doubt about it. You need to have a responsive website with an excellent UX.

Google is rolling out AMP and soon, if you don’t have an optimised mobile website, you will be losing a lot of Google rankings.

TIP: Assuming you have an optimised mobile website, create mobile ad campaigns for all of your advertising efforts and leverage the usage on mobile.

Awesome TIP: To get yourself up and running fast and not lose out on mobile traffic, start using Facebook Ads within Instant Articles or Facebook Canvas, available only for Mobile. It’s just amazing how beautiful it looks and how easy it is to set up. Learn more about it here.

Personalisation

Personalisation drives brand loyalty and all of us should pay close attention to what Spotify or Netflix are doing in terms of personalising the experience we have on their apps.

31% of people consider themselves to be brand loyalists, with 41% of these stating that they would be happy for retailers to use their purchase history to personalise the content that is sent to them.

But according to a study carried out by Boston Retail Partners, retailers are still not attending to these consumer preferences.

This is a huge opportunity.

TIP: Use tools like Omniconvert to survey your customers and build personalised content for them for the next time they come onto your website.

For Example:

Landingi.com created different landing pages for their clients according to who their audience is.

When they were using a simple general landing page for the whole audience group, their conversion rate was a mere 8%. But when they started to use personalised landing pages according to who was visiting them, the conversion rate skyrocketed to 31.4%.

Awesome TIP: Add your customer avatar’s influencer and if you have the name of your lead/customer, add it to the landing page and get a conversion rate of up to 57%, the same as what Landingi got when they used this strategy.

Niche Marketing

2 years back, I was working in a very niche market – the triathlon market at triathlonresearch.org. Its founder Sam was in the US army; he was a triathlon hobbyist, so he was not an expert in the field.

But because of his marketing skills, he saw an opportunity in this niche and built a digital publishing company around it. It involves helping triathlon stars like Craig Alexander (7-time Ironman Winner) or Gwen Jorgensen to build and sell their online training programmes on how to be a better triathlete.

He succeeded in this very niche market by working with the best, because the competition was very low, and because he made it his mission to understand the pain and passion of triathlete wannabes.

Sam was always eager to learn more about his niche market. He was going to all kinds of triathlon events, participating himself in training sessions and even racing.

By doing that, he was able to not only understand but also experience the pain of his market.

As he puts it in one of his blog posts:

Triathlon racing is a powerful demonstration of our humanity – our courage, our fears, our doubts, and our joy, all wrapped into one intense experience.

He knew all too well that he was able to speak their language through all the stories, ad copy, and webinars he was conducting.

Again, he was not a triathlete. He just understood the power of niche marketing and dominated that market for a while.

Images source: triathlonresearch.org

If you try to target all markets you will be in big trouble, because you’ll find yourself surrounded by a load of competition and it will be hard to showcase your unique value proposition.

A rule of thumb is to start narrow and then grow wider.

Start talking to one group of your audience and be specific about their needs and desires so that you can attend to them with your product and services.

Benefits of niche marketing:

1. Less competitive – a small market means less competition. Carrying out good research across a small market makes it easier to find out the strengths and weaknesses of your competition and makes your product or service better.
2. More affordable – you won’t be spending money on a broad target group, so you won’t waste money on advertising.
3. Customers are more loyal – you will be able to nurture, teach, and understand them much better.
4. Audience is easier to target – you know where they hang out and what their interests are, which makes it easier to target and offer them your solution.
5. Focused – trying to offer different services for each market can be inefficient, whereas having one nice one will help you to be much more efficient and focused on one single market.

B2B Lead Generation

This is a big one and the main topic of our guide.

We’ll touch more on this in the prospecting and outreaching section of our guide.

Nevertheless, building a list and segmenting is crucial for your business, as you want to speak with as many people as possible.

Here are some lead generation techniques for you that you might not know about:

1. Quora and Reddit – One of my favourites is to go out and find the questions that my audience is asking.
2. Guest posting – You might find this odd, but writing on blogs where your audience hangs out can bring new free leads to your business.

How you can do it?

1. Research the best blogs and online media sites in your niche
2. Pitch your content to them
3. Write valuable content with a CTA at the end, which links to a landing page where you offer free value
4. Capture the leads
5. Start separate email marketing campaigns for leads coming in through guest posts, as you might want to personalise the content
6. Our example article on lead generation for the Marketing Automation Network is here

LinkedIn profile views hack – Use this at your own risk, but this is working for me as we speak. Add an Iframe with your LinkedIn profile page into your webpage header

LinkedIn Hack

<iframe src=”LINK TO YOUR LINKEDIN PROFILE” height=”1″ width=”1″ frameBorder=”0″></iframe>

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This way, all of your webpage visitors will be considered as LinkedIn profile views.

Now you can start sending them sales follow-up emails. We’ll talk more about how and what emails you should be sending in Chapter 3.

1. Use Gmail Ads and target job titles as keywords. This way, if your prospective customer uses Gmail and they have the job title you are targeting in the email signature, you will be able to show ads in the promotional tab of Gmail.
2. Use LeadFuze to prospect on LinkedInHere is a short tutorial on how to use LeadFuze. An awesome thing is that you can get up to 4,000 leads if you are using F6S.com’s offer. Check it out here.
3. Export your LinkedIn contacts, upload them as a Facebook audience, and start running Facebook lead ads to your free giveaway, offer, ebook, or just invite them to your webinar (if you’re running one).

Here is a short tutorial I made on how to do it.

--- Tutorial video coming soon ---

PRO Tip: Use UTM tags when you share links on all of these sources so that you can find out which is your best lead source.

B2B Influencer Marketing 2017 (Advanced)

In short, word of mouth is what influencer marketing is. It is used a lot in ecommerce. Below you have an interesting survey.

54% of women around the world have purchased a product or service after seeing it in an influencer’s post, according to a survey by Bloglovin.

B2B can benefit a lot from influencer marketing, here’s how.

Every week I listen to Mixergy, and a few other podcastings, and they influence my buying decisions on marketing tools and courses.

Why? Because the quality of the content is very good and I know they don’t recommend rubbish.

I understood this and built my business with the help of local influencers. I partnered with local businesses, investors, and authorities that helped me grow my business.

Here are the top 5 strategies we used and tested for B2B influencer marketing:

1. 1. Attend meetups, TED talks, and conferences run by influencers and engage with them; don’t sell anything at first, just buy what they sell and be their client to begin with. Networking with influencers on a F2F basis is key, but if you are just selling and not bringing any value to the relationship, you will not succeed.
   2. Partner with investors, and ask them if they need help in your niche in exchange for putting you in contact with other companies or investors if you do a good job.
   3. Guest posting and review posts: I mentioned this in the lead generation section too and it is very valid here as well. Reach out to bloggers and media where your audience is hanging out and write how-tos, and about strategies and the benefits of using your niche product or service.
   4. Sponsor review posts about your product the same way ecommerce businesses do, do pro bono services, or offer your tool as a giveaway in exchange for a review on an influencer’s blog or community.
   5. Identify rising star bloggers (not yet influencers) and ask them to interview you and share your story. I did this here.

All these strategies are worth testing in any niche, B2B or B2C.

Just be where these influencers are online and offline, add value, don’t be salesy, and remember to buy first before you sell.

Conclusions

It is very clear that video on mobile will be the biggest trend this year: Facebook Live, YouTube, and Periscope videos will grow a lot over this coming year and that’s a fact. So go and get your content ready for video.

Now, if you do this well and ensure that your content strategy involves getting across all devices at the right time, as well as choosing your niche market to work in, you’ll definitely be way ahead of your competition.

Learn more How To Generate and Nurture More B2B Leads from our Playbook!

Read more on our blog MAN Digital Blog

from Digital Marketing Automation Consulting | MAN Digital http://mandigitalblog.blogspot.com/2017/04/b2b-digital-marketing-trends-2017.html
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