The social media myth

Influencer marketing is no longer completely new on the scene, but there are few B2B marketing departments that are harnessing its full power. So what are the easy steps you can take to capitalise on the influence of the most powerful figures within your industry?

In this webinar, Danielle Howe, reports editor at B2B Marketing, will be joined by Luke Brynley-Jones, MD at OST and Nicolas Chabot, head of EMEA at Traackr, who will discuss the steps you can take to create and run a successful influencer marketing programme for your B2B brand.

In this session you'll learn:

• The value of influencer marketing in B2B, and whether it's right for you.

• How to identify your most powerful influencers, and steps you can take to engage with them.

• How to collaborate with influencers to extend the reach of your brand and engagement with new audiences.

As ideas, apps, and innovations continue to explode onto the scene, what was once considered far-off in the distance is literally around the corner. Event professionals must decide both which technologies to implement to improve the attendee experience, and new ways to encourage social sharing.

In this webinar, Matthew Howarth from Cvent will explore what’s in store for event technology and social media in 2017.

Matthew will additionally discuss:

- New ways to use Snapchat, Augmented Reality, and Video- Enabled Beacons to create memorable moments for attendees.

- How technology will change the way attendees consume content both in the short-term and beyond.

CX is widely recognised as the key battleground for B2B companies in the increasingly digitally-enabled buyer environment. But what does great CX look like for B2B brands? And, more to the point, what role can B2B marketers play in getting it right?

Leveraging primary research conducted with B2B buyers, this webinar will examine the cornerstones of how to get CX right in a B2B environment, and look at the provide practical tips and actionable strategies for marketers looking to raise their CX game.

It will be presented by B2B Marketing’s Editor-in-chief Joel Harrison, who will be joined by David Hicks of specialist CX consultancy, and marketing trainer and consultant Shane Redding.

In this session, you’ll learn:
• Marketing’s role in delivering excellent CX
• The role of influencers in CX
• How to measure and report CX, and to whom.
• How to create a company-wide approach to CX

Are marketers running at a hundred miles an hour and, as a result, too focused on box-ticking and just ‘getting things done’, rather than being mindful of having a real impact on the business? Is this the dawn of the Breathless Marketer?

Recent research from Octopus Group found that B2B marketing directors were losing sleep over their jobs. Competitive changes and choice were driving delays in decision-making and putting them under increased pressure to meet marketing challenges with innovation and creativity. All of this and a whole marketing plan to deliver – on time and on budget.

In this webinar, we’ll cover:

•The typical traits of a ‘breathless business’
•How to spot the signs of being a breathless marketer
•Creating an action plan for change based on your situation & organisation
•The Smart, Strong and Slick levers – how they work and when to pull them!

Are you struggling to keep pace with rapidly changing customer needs and market demands? Are you slowed down by organisational silos, hierarchies, and processes? It may be time to get Agile. More than 90% of marketers who have adopted Agile marketing say it has improved their speed to market for ideas, products, and campaigns.

Whether your marketing organisation is just curious, starting the transition or all in on Agile, the time to learn about Agile marketing is now! Join Agile marketing expert Andrea Fryrear, and Workfront Creative Director David Lesué, as they explore what it means to be an Agile marketer and provide practical tips on how your organisation can make the transition.

Attend this webinar and learn how to:
•Secure leadership buy-in to move to an Agile marketing methodology.
•Respond to market changes more quickly.
•Improve collaboration between departments and locations.
•Avoid daily distractions and stay focused on the right priorities.

Last year, marketers were focused on predictive analytics and ABM. This year is proving to be all about how machine learning and artificial intelligence will impact marketing strategies.

Leading organisations powering the marketing technology landscape are quickly innovating to introduce new technologies and are determined to make marketers successful. But just how will this happen? What questions should you be asking in order to innovate on your go-to-market plans?

Join us on Tuesday 4th April as we discuss how machine learning and artificial intelligence is shaping marketing decisions, driving growth and improving the customer experience.

Many B2B marketers face 3 key challenges that are potentially holding back their ability to generate those opportunities the business desires, namely:

1. No insight on anonymous website visitors
2. No idea if content is being seen by the right people
3. Lots of budget being wasted on display ads

If any of these pains resonate with you, this session is a must as we explore the effect these issues have on your business. We will cover how to solve these pains and build a marketing strategy based on this data.

During this interactive webinar, you will learn how to:

• Identify your anonymous website traffic
• Ensure content is seen by target accounts on your website
• Take control of the buyer journey from the beginning
• Deliver targeted personalised display ads

There’s one crucial factor that dramatically increases the effectiveness and ROI of marketing automation - and the chances are you’re not using it.

Register now for this master-class webinar to learn the secrets of MA humanisation – what it is, how to use it and how it can double, treble or more, the effectiveness of your MA.

Kirsty Dawe of MarketMakers and Really B2B will reveal:

• How to ramp up the conversion rates from your lead scoring programme
• How to combine social, email, content and telemarketing to see the best results
• How best to support marketing automation with each channel
• How to elevate a marketing qualified lead to a truly hot sales qualified lead with telemarketing

An effective social media strategy should take attendees on a seamless journey, from pre-event through to post-event. This interactive discussion will approach each part of the event cycle – before, during and after. Tune in to discover how to effectively integrate social at every touchpoint, amplify the live event content on all platforms, and engage all of your attendees.

Join Emily (Vera) Fritz from Cvent to discover:

- The secret to a seamless journey all the way through to post-event
- How to integrate social media at every stage of the process
- How social will supercharge your live event content on all platforms
- How to provide an all important engagement platform for your attendees

This presentation, part of the 5 Tenets of Modern Marketing Series, gives marketers a how-to guide for transforming your database to support effective segmentation and persona-driven communication and engagement.

Unreliable targeting can end a conversation from the beginning. The first step in building any sustainable structure is to ensure a proper foundation. Think of your database as this foundation.

Join Rob Heerdegen, of OMC to discover how to:

- Create persona-driven communications that power customer engagement
- Build and implement marketing campaigns that resonate with real people
- Extract laser targeted customer insights that deliver real value
- Increase your conversion rate on your re-engagement campaigns through continual data cleansing tactics

Research is an umbrella term for a range of different data and insight disciplines. But what role does it play in modern marketing strategies and what hurdles can it overcome?

In this webinar, we’ll be exploring what types of data and research really make an impact on your marketing efforts and where to apply and deploy different research strategies. From brand audits to thought leadership to customer insights, marketers need to run, jump and skip through the data decathlon to find that illusive competitive advantage.

Hosted by Loudhouse Research founder, Billy Hamilton-Stent, we’ll cover:

• Strategies to make research achieve many more business objectives
• How to get maximum ROI from research by expanding the scope without breaking the bank
• Case studies of research that have wowed the business

Marketing automation doesn’t have to seem like a distant frontier. Layer One Media’s James Pellizzi delivers a hands-on session with actionable insight that you can deploy, faster than your competitors eat lunch. Presentation followed by 10 minute Q&A.

Near enough, is no longer good enough.

The survival of the external agency is now determined not by creative originality, but by creative effectiveness.

In a digital age in which the client marketing team is under extreme pressure to continuously shift the dial on acquisition and conversion rates, and have the analytics in real-time, the margin between success and failure can come down to a couple of percent in campaign effectiveness.

In this webinar in partnership with B2B Marketing and The Church Agency, we’ll discuss:

• The reality faced by marketing agencies to deliver effective global campaigns that speak locally
• How to handle the balance of effective campaigns that resonate vs. cost vs. operational efficiency
• How to handle the localization process and who owns responsibility: Agency vs. Client
• The key questions you should be asking about localization & campaign results that can be achieved through great localization.

This webinar outlines breakthrough approaches B2B marketers can take to drive revenue through optimising the buyer journey, based on understanding buyers, the buying steps they take and the outcomes they are aiming for. We’ll look at how to understand the new digitally driven buying process including cues that buyers exhibit during different journey phases, the ‘buying’ jobs they perform through the process, the outcomes they are seeking and the interactions that happen. Then we’ll explore ways to design and deliver brilliant marketing solutions where every interaction is tailored to buyers’ needs, with special focus on those buying outcomes that are under-served.

Intelligent management of the buyer journey is a vital component of strategies to drive better revenue and growth. This webinar will give you what you need to accelerate your efforts.

You will learn:
• How to understand buyers and their buyer journeys
• How to take a step back from your current efforts to evaluate your audience and work out how to serve them better
• How to improve the buyer journey and customer lifecycle
• How to identify and act on buyers’ digital cues
• The pillars of marketing success, and how to deploy them

A recent Octopus Group study of UK marketing directors revealed that changes in the competitive landscape were causing them to lose sleep, with over half stating that differentiation was a major challenge.

Billy Hamilton Stent, MD of Octopus Group’s research unit, Loudhouse, will discuss:

1) How to use customer insight to formulate a differentiating B2B strategy that strikes the right balance of engaging customers and appeasing internal stakeholders.
2) How to activate differentiating campaigns brilliantly to build brand advocacy quickly.

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.