This Week in Marketing: Rethinking Problems and Solutions

When business problems prove difficult to solve, sometimes all you need is a fresh angle. In the B2B marketing field, we talk a lot about creativity as a driver of great content, but it’s also an incredibly valuable trait in problem-solving – for your company and your customers.

As one example, last week on the LinkedIn Ads Blog, we highlighted an alternative way to think about audience targeting and personalization in a post-cookie era. Elsewhere around the web, we see marketing leaders getting creative to differentiate their storytelling, improve their marketing attribution, seize on pop-culture trends and drive growth in a tough market.

You’ll find all of these insights and more in our latest round-up of new trendy content for B2B marketers. Get ready to dive in!

What to Read

Brand Storytelling in the Digital Age: How Tech Companies Can Stand Out (LinkedIn Collective): Dux Raymond Si, Chief Brand Officer for AvePoint, shares advice on how to tell resonant and human-focused brand stories by focusing on the two C’s: consistency and clarity.

B2B Keyword Research: A Comprehensive Guide (Search Engine Land): Evolve your SEO strategy with this expansive and enlightening guide from Tom Demers, who conveys a great deal of information you can put into action.

Lead Scoring: The Value In B2B Marketing (Search Engine Journal): Alex Macura explores a popular practice for rating and prioritizing B2B leads based on customized criteria.

Mastering Revenue Attribution With Dreamdata’s Steffen Hedebrandt (G2): Revenue attribution continues to be one of biggest topics in digital marketing. Dreamdata CMO and co-founder Steffen Hedebrandt shares many great tips and philosophies in this interview with Soundarya Jayaraman

How the Pandemic Changed Marketing Channels (Harvard Business Review): We’re now more than three years away from the initial onset of COVID-19, but some of its impacts are still being felt. HBR lays out some resulting long-term trends, such as the expanded use of social media for brands.

What to Watch

What B2B Marketers Can Learn from the Barbie “Newsjacking” Frenzy

With the new Barbie movie dominating in the box office and cultural conversations, Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute explores the highly relevant topic of “newsjacking,” which he describes as injecting your ideas into breaking news and adding your own spin to it. It can be a valuable technique, he says … if you do it right.

What to Know

According to Insider Intelligence’s forecast, US B2B product sales growth is slow this year, at 3.4 percent. At the same time, ad spending is increasing with a growth rate of 9.3 percent. As competition steepens, Insider Intelligence’s Sara Lebow shares six expert-sourced insights for growing your B2B business in a difficult market:

1. Differentiate your offerings.
2. Solve the right problems.
3. Don't over-index on performance. Branding B2B still matters.
4. Your client isn't just the executive.
5. B2B buyers expect a B2B experience.
6. Be curious—but cautious—about generative AI.

Make sure to follow the LinkedIn Collective for more insights.