B2B Marketing

Instead of marketing to an impossibly large number of individuals marketers need to focus more on what your prospects have in common rather than what separates them. As community Marking is grows in popularity, many marketers now appreciate that building such a community allows you to separate yourself from the competition, increase the perceived and actual value of the brand and charge a premium for your products.


We need to create a community of like minded prospects and customers who feel like they 'belong'. This webinar shows you how mobile marketing holds the key to growing your community and connecting people on the basis of more than just the product.

This webinar will cover the following:

1. What is a brand community?
2. Why should you build a brand community? (Why your prospects and customers are seeking community)
3. Mobile's role in building your community
4. Case study in community building and mobile marketing

What are the top-performing marketers doing differently from the rest? Our latest piece of research sought to find this out.

We identified four areas – the four ‘pillars’ of marketing – that the best marketers are putting at the heart of their marketing every day: strategy, customer, brand and measurement.

In this webinar Danielle Howe, reports editor at B2B Marketing, and Andrew Dalglish, director at Circle Research, will discuss:

What high performance marketing is, what the four pillars are and why they matter.

How high performance marketers do consistently better, and what you can learn from them.
How you can start thinking differently to join the best and leave the rest behind.

Download Tech Heads 'The Sleepless CMO' via report via http://brandtosales.weareoctopusgroup.net/tech-heads-2016

Why are businesses taking longer to make purchasing decisions?

In our digital world of speed and convenience it doesn’t make sense that anything should take longer.

In 2015 Octopus Group’s annual ‘Tech Heads’ study looked at why B2B buying cycles were getting longer, and this year’s study explores the impact that trend is having on marketers.

They found that today’s CMOs are six times more likely to lose sleep that gain it compared to previous years, and are having to be more creative than ever to outwit their competitors. With the majority of them under increased pressure to hit targets, 90% of CMOs say they’re having to be more creative than ever to compete.

This trend has given rise to the ‘Sleepless CMO’. In this webinar, Octopus Group’s Billy Hamilton-Stent explores

What’s keeping marketers awake at night
What’s delaying prospects’ buying decisions
Ways to tell your brand’s story in a new way to awaken your buyers

Marketers are ignoring one of the most fundamental customer needs: community. Hundreds of millions has been spent on customer centricity and understanding the persona to the nth degree in order to provide 'killer customer insight'. But we have all been blind to one of the most fundamental needs in human life that only comes second to food and shelter: the need to belong.

The stuff of the human condition is to belong, to make meaning, feel secure, have order within chaos and create identity. Marketers ignore these constituent building blocks of humanity at their peril.

This webinar will explain what a branded community is, why it is fundamental for marketing now and in the future, and how to build one for your organisation.

Virtual reality is one of the most talked about marketing trends of the moment. Sceptics argue that the technology is over-hyped. But is it time for B2B brands to start thinking seriously about VR content?

In this webinar, Simon and David cut to the chase. They highlight real examples of businesses using VR to deliver tangible benefits. And they explore the powerful contribution the technology can make to B2B marketing strategies. A specific area of focus will be sales and marketing surrounding high-value investments with long-tail consideration.

Viewers will gain:

Insight into potential B2B applications of VR.
An understanding of how VR investment can add value and enhance top-of-funnel elimination.
Ideas for enhancing customer service with VR technology.
A realistic view of the investment and dedication required to get VR off the ground.

We know there is a lot of information out there to help marketers do their jobs better. Content marketing is one of the key tactical forces behind engaging the customer, and is therefore a particularly hot topic.

This webinar is focused on content marketing, but specifically the three core areas of the discipline that marketers can benefit from learning more about – regardless of where you are on your journey.

By attending the webinar you’ll learn:

How to develop a balanced content marketing plan to support your most significant business objectives.
How to mine sources of inspiration to help create meaningful content.
How to maximise existing content to create additional assets.
Content calendar best practices.
Ways to get to know your content comrades within your organisation.
The idea behind ‘content as data’ (and other must-have content marketing metrics).

Implementing marketing automation: breaking through the bottleneck

More than 60 per cent of marketers use mass email blasts to stay in touch with customers, however only 13 per cent are using automation software. There are many reasons why the majoirty of companies are yet to embrace marketing automation, but, in most cases, it’s either down to a lack of time and resource; too many internal processes and stakeholder hurdles; or the inability to build a business case to gain financial backing.

What many people don’t realise is that after the initial setup, marketing automation can increase productivity, allow marcomms to become more personalised and frequent, and deliver on ROI in a matter of weeks, if not days.

This guide will help you to overcome the challenges of implementing marketing automation within your business, including:

The three most common business bottlenecks.
Why you should automate your marketing.
What can you automate? Including examples of marketing outputs you can automate.
Building a business case (ROI, calculating time savings, relevant content – hot topic for 2016).
The right tool for the job – choosing your software.

In its annual Tech Heads study, Octopus Group spoke to over 400 UK directors to explore trends in content consumption and buyer behaviours for B2B businesses. (To view the full Tech Heads report, visit: http://bit.ly/TechHeads15)

The findings reveal a paradox: attention spans are shortening, but decision making time is extending (an average of 16.5 weeks currently according to respondents).

Octopus Group calls this challenge the ‘Content Pinch Point’, and it’s a big problem for marketers. It means that it’s never been harder to connect with and subsequently convert prospects.

Marketers now face a difficult task: catching prospects’ attention quickly through bold, creative, differentiating campaigns that are short on words and big on impact; yet once sales teams are engaged with prospects, marketing needs to suddenly become considered, consultative and big on substance to help their sales colleagues get over the finishing line.

Two very different styles of content marketing, which are incredibly difficult to integrate without appearing to have a bi-polar brand.

But there’s a huge opportunity for marketers who do manage to get it right, as their brand will give prospects a truly elevated and differentiated experience, which will tell in the pipeline they generate.

This webinar aims to help marketers capitalise on the opportunity and Billy Hamilton-Stent, Octopus Group’s client strategy director, will cover:

How the content ‘pinch point’ is adversely affecting marketing departments.
The tell-tale signs that reveal the pinch in your campaigns.
Strategies to rectify the problem and turn results around.
Practical ways marketers can support sales in the journey from interested lead to high value customer.

Click here to view Tech Heads: http://bit.ly/TechHeads15

B2B buying is becoming increasingly complex. The number of influencers, decision makers and stakeholders involved in the process is one driver of this. It’s further compounded by today’s multiplicity of marketing communications channels.

How can you master these challenges to deliver real and continuous pipeline for your products and solutions?

The secret is to align your approach to various channels, touchpoints and moments in time. Each interaction with your audience – be it customer, prospect or influencer - should be based on insight, tailored to the individual and deliver an impact.

This is ‘smarter demand generation’. It’s an approach that integrates data, technology, people and tactics. It leverages insight to improve targeting and messaging, and it’s optimised to deliver real, measurable impact to your pipeline.

This webinar will outline practical tips on achieving smarter demand generation. It will enable you to:

•Gain insights into the changing approach of B2B organisations when buying products/solutions
•Learn how to design and execute demand generation that delivers results in this new buying paradigm
•Encompass both digital and human interactions, aligning demand generation to the way buyers educate themselves, learn about solutions and ultimately select their vendors
•Understand the pitfalls to avoid
•Plan the steps needed to improve your own marketing and sales for smarter demand generation

The last few years have seen a dramatic increase in the awareness of account-based marketing. Wanting to know how this is impacting B2B marketers, Demandbase recently teamed up with Demand Metric to conduct a research study on account-based marketing adoption and usage among B2B marketing companies.

This webinar will showcase more than 20 key findings on the latest trends in adoption, readiness, and business impact of ABM. You’ll also walk away with steps you need to take to successfully execute an ABM strategy.

In this webinar, you’ll learn:

Adoption rates for ABM within B2B organizations.
Which types of companies are adopting ABM.
How ABM impacts your business.
Key steps in how to adopt and get started with an ABM strategy.