Global Content Marketing for B2B w/ Giuseppe Caltabiano
The Masters and Mavericks podcast, hosted by Textappeal and Newsroom founder Elliot Polak, is a dedicated portal for discussing global content marketing, global social media strategies, and other means of propagating a company’s message across the world. The monthly discussion focuses on highlighting organisations and individuals who are disrupting the natural order of things and bringing new concepts, strategies, and ideas to the market.
On this month’s programme, Elliot sat down with Giuseppe Caltabiano, the Vice President of Marketing Integration at Schneider Electric. His expertise in marketing stretches back nearly 20 years and is built upon a background in engineering. During his career, Giuseppe has managed various teams in the fields of energy, technology, software, and more, making his knowledge and experience rich and ripe for deep sharing and insights.
It can be argued that social media and global content marketing are more geared towards B2C companies, and B2B businesses are really still figuring out how to use these tactics. Giuseppe explained that these strategies have driven massive growth for B2B business in the social and global content marketing arenas and B2B companies are actually now adopting these methods faster than the B2C sector. The main difference between the two models is that B2C messaging is more emotionally driven, whereas B2B focuses on the value provided.
As for the sector that Giuseppe serves, he has found that Twitter and Linkedin are powerful platforms for B2B global content marketing and social media engagement. Additionally, resources like SlideShare and podcasts are fantastic platforms for driving traffic.
While the materials developed for these platforms are generated in English by a global team, packages are put together and localised for other countries. Currently, his company’s blog is marketed in seven different languages and reaches about 15 different countries. As conversations emerge from this content, his team does not try to control the dialogue as that is best handled at the local level. Giuseppe’s company merely facilitates content which is handled as an 80/20 model. Eighty percent of content is generated at a global level and 20% is local. The reason for this, as Giuseppe explained, is that, “Not all the content generated at a global level will work. Different sectors [and] different customers need different approaches and even different social media platforms.”
Since this model has been quite successful for Schneider, Giuseppe offered up some words of wisdom to fellow marketers on what to keep in mind to replicate similar results. First is to document every aspect of a marketing strategy; this means putting on paper the content marketing strategy, social media plans, marketing blueprints, and every other component. While B2B marketers say they are adopting global content marketing, only about half are actually documenting their plans. “Without documentation you will simply fail.”
Giuseppe generously shared a lot more advice for marketers entering into content marketing, including metrics that will resonate with management, how to optimize global content marketing efforts, and various other insights. Check out the full podcast for this valuable guidance and recommendations.
Don’t forget to acquire the knowledge shared by Steph Hamill in our last podcast on The Current Role of Women in the Advertising Industry.
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