3 Marketing Ideas from a great marketing company - Kinaxis

B2B Demand Generation | Learning from the best

What can you learn from the savviest marketing companies on Earth?

It’s more important than ever for business leaders to look at other industries to learn. Ideas from one industry no longer work. This is why companies need to look at new ideas from companies like Kinaxis.

Kinaxis is a supply chain software company in Ottawa, Canada that competes against much larger rivals with very deep pockets.  With that kind of challenge, how are they faring?

Quite well. Thank you.

I spoke with Kirsten Watson, now VP of Marketing at Kinaxis. (Congrats on your promotion, Kristen.) Insights from her interview became the inspiration for this blog article - good stuff you can use.

In processing Kirsten’s interview, I was struck by the utter simplicity of their approach. It can be boiled down to 3 key points that you can use in your business:

  1. Attract prospective buyers with Humor and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
    Lots of funny videos like SuiteMates, (below) Married to the Job, and Late, Late Supply Chain Show. (modeled after David Letterman’s show.) And they relentlessly focus on high rankings in search engines for their keywords.Here’s a sample:
  2. Keep prospective buyers with thought leadership
    Thought Leadership
    A robust blog, third-party experts (with smiling photos and short bios of real people), featured content, content published in third-party publications.Once they visit, they stay.
  3. Think Like a Publisher
    A good example of publishing is what they do when they create a white paper. Ardath Albee talks about the Rule of 5 on content - instead of one piece of content, turn it into five.
    Here’s the process Kinaxis uses:
  • Produce a white paper (1)
  • Video interview of the author, asking her about the white paper. (YouTube) (2)
  • Then they strip out the audio for a podcast. (iTunes). (3)
  • Finally, they produce a transcript, which is used in 3-4 blog articles. (Blog) (4,5, and 6)

Results

One year after starting the process of moving from 1. to 2., Kinaxis measured these results.

  • 2,700% increase in website visitors
  • 3,200% increase in conversions (leads)
  • 5,300% increase in traffic to the blog

It’s not complicated, is it? Attract ‘em with humor and SEO, keep them with though leadership content and use publishing approach to create lots of content - which feed both SEO and thought leadership.

Are you thinking “It’s too hard and we don’t have the people or the budget for this?” Sorry, but the marketing department at Kinaxis is only four people and their marketing spend is in line with industry averages.

Is B2B marketing really that complicated? Or can we take ideas from companies like Kinaxis to make a big difference?

What do you think? We love comments and people who share.

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Jeff Ogden (@fearlesscomp) is the President of the B2B lead generation consultancy Find New Customers.and the host of Mad Marketing TV.
Find New Customers helps companies dramatically improve revenue results by transforming the way they attract, engage and win new customers. Contact Find New Customers by calling (516) 495-9350 or sending an email to sales at findnewcustomers.com.

“If more companies listened to (Find New Customers) a lot more would be sold.” Dan McDade, Pointclear.

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