For the second year in our experts series, VA Partners reached out to local leaders and clients to provide insights on the sales and marketing landscape. We asked them to provide feedback about a specific topic about the startup and small business community. In the first post, our experts weigh in on what marketing tactics took more importance in 2016.

Here’s What They Had to Say:

I’m a big believer in content marketing to demonstrate thought leadership and provide value to the community. I publish a weekly newsletter that has enjoyed strong subscriber growth. I’m interested in doing more public speaking to expand my brand profile and awareness.

– Mark Evans, Principal at Mark Evans Consulting, @markevans

We are really stepping into using Video a lot more frequently this year. Most notably, we’ve been doing a lot on Snapchat and now Instagram Stories. It’s been fun to give our marketing a little more of a ‘human touch’ through video and we’re getting great feedback from the community. 

– Hailley Griffis, PR Specialist at Buffer, @hailleymari

Driving Leads

Lead generation is obviously always important.  Google AdWords continues to drive leads for our B2B clients, and Google has made some useful updates to their platform recently, including the elimination of ads in right hand column of search results pages, expanded text ads, and a more mobile-friendly ad platform.  We’ve also been driving more leads with LinkedIn Sponsored Updates, which we’ve found more useful for “softer sells” such as white papers, webinar sign-ups, and free trials.

Converting Leads

You really can’t talk about driving leads without also converting leads – they’re two sides of the same coin.  Whether it’s a headline, copy, an image, pricing, or the amount of fields on a form, we continually test and optimize landing and web pages for maximum conversion.  I see website conversion and testing technologies and companies growing as big as the marketing automation tool industry, it’s that crucial to performance and profits.

– Robert Clarke, Director of Marketing at Op Ed Marketing, @robertclarkey

It’s been fascinating to watch over the last year how video has continued to grow in importance. Our B2B and B2C customers are using more video in their marketing strategies than ever before. And I think most of the credit goes to video marketing platforms like Vidyard, Wistia, and Brightcove. They’ve made it easier than ever to create and deliver great video experiences and measure exactly how visitors, prospects, and customers are engaging with them.

– Sam Brennand, Director of Customer Success at Uberflip, @SamBrennand

We found that “un-gating” certain pieces of high value content has become important. Un-gating content and not forcing someone to give up their contact info for a piece of high value content on your website can lead to better SEO, more “know-like-trust” with a potential customer and ultimately more high quality leads.

Branding & clear messaging are more important than ever before. We’ve been encouraging our clients to pay more attention to what they are saying, how they say it, and making sure it’s clear across all platforms.

Similarly breakthrough content is just as important as it ever was. We’ve been pushing our clients (and ourselves) to work on fewer, more high-quality content pieces.

We’ve also seen the rise of the importance of long-form high value content, for example one of the most popular content pieces we produced for a client this year was Miovision’s long-form content piece:  The Changemaker’s Guide to Walkable and Bikeable Cities.

– Sourov De, Managing Partner at Stryve Digital Marketing, @Sourovde

My clients are investing more in case studies. It didn’t surprise me when new research from The B2B Technology Marketing Group revealed that case studies are the most effective B2B content marketing tactic. They are useful throughout all stages of the sales cycle and can be repurposed in tons of ways – from blog posts to webinars. They also tell your story from your customers’ perspectives. B2B buyers value their peers’ opinions, so a well-written case study can be very persuasive.

– Rachel Foster, CEO and B2B Copywriter at Fresh Perspective Copywriting, @CopywriterTO

One of our goals at VA Partners is to increase our inbound leads. The first step to do this is to increase our website’s traffic. With the help of different forms of content such as infographics, videos, templates, and interview style blogs (like this one) we’ve been able to increase our over all traffic.  Next we had to boost efforts to convert the traffic into leads. One tactic we used was to improve the functionality of our website to promote lead generation. We decided to highlight our downloadable assets on our side bar, include more relevant calls to action on our blog posts, provide easier ways to sign-up for our newsletter and give visitors access to the contact us page more readily. The small changes on our website had big impact on our overall lead generation.

– Tabitha David, Marketing Manager at Venture Accelerator Partners, @TabithaDavid

What new marketing tactics grew in importance for you? Let us know in the comments below.

If you haven’t already, check out our first expert series blog – The Experts: Biggest Challenges for Digital Marketers.