Welcome to this edition of B2B Marketing at its Core, an industry newsletter with news, nuggets, and information on best practices in business-to-business marketing. With it, we hope to share information vital to any organization looking to generate results and accelerate growth through intelligent strategy, public relations, branding, marketing and demand generation.


Let’s face it, the days of bottomless marketing budgets are long gone. Today, marketing executives have limited dollars and resources, but the pressure to get the same number, if not more, of leads for their sales teams is still there. So marketing execs must be smart about how they use their marketing investment and look for creative ways to get the leads they need.

One guaranteed approach to help you get the maximum return out of your marketing campaigns is to follow the 3 R’s: reduce, reuse and refresh. Let’s take a closer look at…

Reduce
Remember the old adage, less is more. Well that’s certainly true when it comes to marketing materials. When you prepare marketing pieces, be sure to reduce the amount of information you communicate. Readers can only digest so much copy. And if your materials, like a brochure, are too copy heavy, readers are likely to be overwhelmed by all of it and not want to read any of it.

Reuse
With budgets tapped out and resources running thin, try to reuse content across all of your marketing channels when possible.

For example, let’s say your public relations team just compiled the results from a national survey on instant messaging usage in the workplace. Content from this survey can not only be used in a press release, but interesting survey statistics can also be repackaged and reused in other marketing efforts, such as a fact sheet, a call-to-action on your company website, a story idea for the media, a sales PowerPoint, a direct marketing campaign, and customer communications, like an HTML email or print newsletter.

Need some more ideas? How about taking the customer story you used in the company newsletter, abbreviate it, and drop it into the monthly HTML e-mail newsletter you send out to prospective clients? Or, take a customer quote, which appeared in a press release, and insert it on your website or in your company brochure.

This “reuse” tactic is a great way to get more mileage out of the exceptional content you already have. And if you are worried that the same content will be seen more than once by the same person, don’t. Most people don’t have the time to read every piece of marketing material from a company – they have to be selective about what they choose to read. Some people only read printed newsletters. While others prefer email and will scan an HTML email from you. Regardless, research shows that a person needs to see something seven times before they remember it.

Refresh
You’ve been reusing the same marketing content for months now, and you’re probably thinking to yourself that its usefulness has certainly come to an end after, among other things, you’ve posted it on the Web, mentioned it in a blog and recorded it in a podcast. Well, before you close the books on that content for good, don’t. Get a whole new story in a snap by refreshing the content you already have.

If you have a customer story written from a customer service angle, consider approaching it from another direction – maybe from an IT perspective. Start by going back through your interview notes to identify any important themes lightly touched on, or not mentioned, in the first article. These newly identified themes can be the start of another article from the same customer. Also, be sure to check back with your customer to see if they’ve experienced any new developments. A lot can happen in six to 12 months, and your customer may have even more compelling examples of how your product or service helped them for the better.

In Closing
We hope the 3 R’s – reduce, reuse and refresh – will help you get more mileage out of your marketing content, dollars and resources.

And, of course, ask us here at Arketi Group – we are always glad to help. We created B2B Marketing at its Core with the goal of enhancing your marketing and public relations practices. We hope you enjoyed this edition.

Sincerely,

The Arketi Group
core@arketi.com  

PS. Visit our new website to learn more: www.arketi.com.

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