From Theory to Practice: How to become a “digital, social, and content” driven B2B company ?

Training your organization on digital, content and social media marketing

Most marketers in B2B today have a project to introduce or expand digital, content and social media marketing into their companies.

In the last few years these types of marketing have become extremely important.

I believe it is the solution to the B2B marketing challenges of today, where companies can transcend from fulfilling the basic marketing needs of their customers.

Transcend towards connecting with their audience by creating experiences that lasts. These experiences that provides your customers with the desire to share their experiences, and become your brand advocates.

But how do you move from theory to practice ?

From theory to practice

“Transcending to experiences that last”. “Get brand advocates.”

Rather fluffy you might say. I agree.

That’s the theory. That’s what your read in all the books. That’s what the thought leaders will tell you.

But when you face the challenge of introducing digital, content and social, where do you start?

• how do you get people to start blogging for your company?
• how do you create a culture of education and sharing freely, internally and externally?
• how do you initiate thought leadership initiatives in your company?
• how do you build an organization that can “listen to the voice of the customer“?
• how do you identify and build strategic content that generates business?
• how do you get people to amplify your marketing on social media?
• how do you learn people how to behave on social media?
• how do you learn the social media basics to people not knowing LinkedIn, Twitter or other social networks?

The initial spark – Spreading the Virus

Changing an organization to embrace all of this needs management buy-in. As I explained previously you’ll need to get key stakeholders on board.

Some time ago I created a powerpoint presentation titled “Spreading the Content Marketing Virus” that contains all the ingredients of what this all is about:

• advertising in B2B doesn’t work as goods as it used to do
• there’s just too much content out there, how do you get your message across?
• Google and social media networks are changing the way people buy
• what can marketing do to answer these challenges?
• what’s the role of the complete organization in this?

146 Slides of Convincing and Learning

The next step after the ‘inital spark’, is to start convincing and training people.

Not only training people in the marketing department, but everyone in your organization:

• Select a number of key people (key sources of power) in the organization and ask them to participate to this training
• Invite literally everyone within your organization to this training.
• Promote the training internally with support of these key people and the C-level.

Bloggers, books, and lot’s of thinking. That’s what it took to build an answer to the question ‘How do I put all of this in practice?’

Here’s a presentation I made to train an internal organization about digital, content and social media marketing.

How to use this Powerpoint

It’s a solid 146 slides. This might seem long, but you can build a complete 2 to 3 hour training from it:

• Use it as a training presentation towards everyone in your organization.
• Customize it so it includes examples from your own organization and your own industry 

I hope you like it.

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Thanks.

Warm regards,

Tom De Baere