Every B2B marketer would love to hit a homerun with every piece that they write.
They would love for every marketing campaign that they are behind to be a rousing success.
Is this likely to happen for anybody? Probably not.
There are too many variables to ensure that every effort is a success.
However, it is possible to an extraordinary B2B marketer whose hits far outnumber their misses, and who does manage to create that viral content that we all aspire to.
Unfortunately, what many people do not realize is that this kind of success is not due to brilliant ideas and clever writing. Instead, this kind of success is a result of developing daily habits that help you to become a more effective B2B expert.
Think of it like this. There are people who can create brilliant content, but they don’t advance in the marketing world.
This is because they never develop the habits to go along with their brilliance.
In order to make daily habits work, requires a shift in mindset.
If you are used to working in a way that involves fighting one fire after another or simply moving from one task to the other as you think of them, you may struggle to adjust to a more consistent and planned approach to your work.
However, once you are able to make that adjustment, you will find that your daily habits really do put you in a position of achieving greater success as a b2b professional than you have in the past.
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Always Begin The Day With a Plan
As a marketing professional, you are busy from the time you hit your office until the time you leave the office.
Sometimes, your days last even longer than that. On any given day, your duties might include promoting existing content, learning new technologies, writing new content, keeping up with social media, marketing data analysis, reaching out to new customers, sales meetings, budgeting, and planning.
That’s a lot of plates to keep spinning at once, especially when the plates can change on a day to day basis.
This is why planning your day (and your week and your month and your quarter) is so important. You are in constant competition with others in your industry, and you cannot afford to drop the ball. Thankfully, technology is your friend.
There are many online editorial calendar apps that you can use to plan your content writing, publishing, and promotion. You can also use a to-do list app or a general calendar to schedule your other tasks.
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Get Caught up With The Latest Developments
In order to create content that makes an impact, you have to stay on top of the latest developments. This includes both developments within your industry and developments in related industries.
You should also keep up with the general news that might be interesting to your audience.
To keep up with happenings in your niche and those closely related to your business, consider doing the following:
- Subscribe to industry related blogs and publications and check in with them daily
- Join online communities where other professionals in your niche communicate with one another about business developments, technologies, trends, and upcoming events
- Follow influencers in your industry on social media
To keep up with news and other events that might impact or interest your audience:
- Use tools like AllTop and BuzzSumo to find out which news and business topics and headlines are creating the most engagement
- Check in with a variety of news sources
- Look at what is trending on Twitter and Facebook
Staying on top of things in your world will enhance your ability to create content that gets audiences engaged and that boosts your reputation as an information source.
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Reach Out to Your Community
While many lists of tips on how to be successful might contain an admonishment to spend less time on social media, the exact opposite is true when it comes to good B2B social media marketing habits.
For you, it is exceptionally important to stay in regular contact with your social media followers and to reach out to them throughout the day. Here is a checklist that may help as you develop this habit:
- Check emails at regular intervals and respond promptly to any communications from customers or clients
- Visit your social media sites to respond to comments, thank people for sharing your content, and to reach out to new followers
- Pass on any customer service issues that are mentioned on social media if appropriate or handle those yourself
- Visit your influencers’ social media pages to like, share, and comment
- DM Twitter followers and others who share your content with a thank you
- If you are sharing or retweeting any content yourself message or DM the source to let them know
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Check in With Your Competitors
Never let a day pass without checking in with your competitors. You cannot be competitive with your marketing efforts if you are unaware of what they are doing.
Visit their web pages to check for any new developments, read any press releases that have come out, and take time to survey their social media pages.
Doing this every day will help you to stay on top of the content your competitors are putting out there and the kind of engagement that they are receiving.
You may discover interests and concerns that your target customers have that you weren’t previously aware of.
You’ll also know, very quickly, when you need to step up your game with regard to content.
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Create New Content And Revisit Your Old But Don’t Phone it in
In order to stay relevant, you need to create new content everyday. Then, you need to look at your old content with the following things in mind: Promoting, updating, and repurposing.
It can be extremely difficult to think of new things to communicate every day, but if your followers cannot count on you for great content they will go elsewhere.
This means that in addition to being prolific, quality has to be the top consideration in everything that you produce. Here are some questions to ask yourself before you determine that a piece of content is worthy of public consumption:
- What problem am I solving for my audience?
- Am I saying anything new about this topic?
- What actions will my audience want to take after viewing this?
- Is this something my audience is really interested in?
- What can I do to make this shareable?
- Is this in keeping with our branding efforts?
- Have I put adequate thought into this posting?
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Check Your Data
No successful content marketing campaign runs perfectly smoothly from start to finish. In order to ensure that your campaigns end well, you have to continually make small adjustments.
This might mean changing up the content that you are putting out there, directing your efforts at a specific subset of your customer persona, or spending more or less time on different social media sites. You may even find that you need to do some redesigning of your landing pages.
Whatever changes you need to make will ideally be data driven. This means, of course, that you have to check your data every day.
Whether you use Google analytics or another package, it should be a daily habit to check your numbers so that you can determine which content is creating trust and traffic and which content is failing.
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Coordinate With Your Team
Chances are, you don’t work alone. You have to coordinate all of your efforts with web designers, graphic designers, salespeople, marketing analysts, even the financials people who have influence over your budget.
When communication is not maintained and the different groups and individuals do not pull their weight, things fall apart.
This is why it is extremely important to have a daily routine of checking in and coordinating all of the various efforts that are underway.
This is the time to delegate tasks, get status reports, find out who is in need of extra hands, and make any adjustments that are necessary to keep things on track.
If this becomes a daily habit, these coordinating sessions will only last a few minutes, can often be conducted using an app for chatting or video conferencing, and serve to keep things on track much better than long-winded weekly staff meetings.
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Take 20 Minutes to Purge
Take a look around you. Not just in your work area, look at the contents of your computer and devices as well. How much clutter is there?
Do you have stacks of papers on your desk and files on your computer from campaigns that were put to bed months ago? Is your email inbox full of communication that should have been purged months ago?
Even worse, do you spend time each day deleting subscription emails because you’ve not bothered to unsubscribe? Do your apps installed on your devices that you haven’t used in months?
If you are nodding your head right now, you aren’t alone. What many people don’t realize is that all of this clutter has a negative impact on productivity and organization.
Take some time to do a major purge, then commit to spending 20 minutes a day eliminating physical and virtual clutter.
This task might include deleting emails, purging files, unsubscribing from lists that are not relevant to you, listening to and responding to voice mails, and sending anything you haven’t touched in 6 months for backup.
Making The Habits Stick
It is not easy to make one habit stick, let alone 8 new habits. Here are a few tips that might work for you.
- Create a List of Reasons That You Are Adopting Each Habit
One of the reasons that it is so difficult to form new habits is that it feels so much easier to simply continue doing what you have always done.
This is even true when your old ways of doing things have been working against you. One thing that can help with this is to create a list of reasons why each new habit is beneficial to you.
This will serve as a reminder when you are tempted to revert back to old working patterns.
- Put Your New Habits in Your Daily Calendar
Each day when you open your calendar, you should see each of the 8 habits listed above.
Do this until each of them becomes something that you do without thinking. Only then should you consider taking them off of your calendar.
Also, do not forget to leave enough time in your schedule for your new habits.
- Get up Early
Not only does it take time to adopt new habits, working new habits into your schedule will probably require extra time in your day. Don’t worry. This is only temporary.
As you work to incorporate these daily habits, your productivity and efficiency will improve. Eventually, this will make your daily workload less strenuous.
However, until that happens, plan to rise a little earlier to get a head start. On days when you don’t need the extra time you will enjoy having that extra breathing room.
- Track Your Success
Find a way to track the success that you have in adopting these new habits and also your failures. However, don’t just mark particular days as successes and failures.
Take the time to figure out what went right and what went wrong. Then, make the appropriate plans and adjustments.
If you are a fan of technology, there are many apps that you can use to track your new habits. Many of them work on the concept that it takes 21 days to fully adopt a new habit.
- Get Your Team Involved
These 8 habits are great for anybody who wants to have a successful B2B marketing career. There is no need to keep them to yourself.
Instead, encourage everybody on your team to incorporate these 8 habits into their daily work schedules. Not only will they find more success in their roles, your team as a whole will rise to the challenges faced better than they have in the past.