Here's the breakdown.  

The marketing landscape is always changing, and marketers like our team at Mountains Wave Marketing must have the flexibility to pivot now more than ever to ensure our client’s content is seen. HubSpot, in collaboration with rockcontent, litmus, WISTIA, and CXD Studio, released the 2022 State of Inbound Marketing Trends Report. The report is a hefty 52-page document surveying more than 1600 marketers in the U.S., Australia, Canada, Germany, the UK, France, and Japan across a variety of industries in the B2B and B2C space. We wanted to break this down into two bite-sized pieces for our readers. 

We've dissected the report, pulling out our key takeaways, to make it that much more digestible for business leaders looking for some of the top trends in marketing. I interviewed Alex George, the founder, and CEO of Mountains Wave Marketing, to help interpret the data.

Note: Mountains Wave Marketing is a U.S.-based agency that primarily focuses on partnering with B2B companies across cleantech, healthtech, fintech, and other technology companies that are making a positive change for humanity in their own specific industries.

In the State of Inbound Marketing Trends Report 2022, the data revealed that influencer “marketing will continue to rise, marketers should invest in short-form video, and content audits should be part of every marketing organization’s strategy.” In this article (1/2), we will be doing a deep dive into all things social media through the lens of this report.

Hey, Alex! In this report, most of the marketers surveyed stated that they preferred posting higher-quality content with less frequency. What’s your personal take on higher quality with less frequency vs quantity of content with lower quality? 

I think when you look at the quantity play, with lower quality, usually what you’re trying to do is stay super engaged with an audience by utilizing video as your main source of content. When you use video in more strategic cases and really put a lot of effort and spend into those videos, you can leverage those videos over a long amount of time. Those types of videos typically have staying power and will be living on your website or something like that for a longer period of time. 

The majority of the companies and organizations that we work with operate in the B2B space, we find, are more interested in the higher quality content that requires a little bit of investment and planning, but love to get more involved with the shorter bite-sized content as well. I know the report says something like ‘83% of marketers prefer higher quality content less often,' but I’m actually more of an even split between the two types of video content. We have found that’s really easy and effective to capture video and then turn it into mini clips, audio segments blog articles, and social media posts. 

One recommendation we took from the marketing trends report is that data is key in decision-making and that it all starts with auditing your content regularly. How do you suggest conducting a content audit? 

You need to figure out exactly what it is you’re looking to learn about with regard to the data that your content can provide. Are you interested in engagement activity, website traffic, lead generation, or something else? Once you understand what you are looking to learn you can organize the data in a way that makes sense.  

For example, if I were coming into a new organization and wanted to understand the overall engagement activity across all forms of content that a client is publishing, I would want to start by organizing their content by type, theme, time of year, and then pull out the metrics that can tell the data story- about their content’s engagement and what was driving it. 

The report includes that the best days and times to post on social media are between 6-9 PM (and for Tiktok, from 3-6 PM). The best days to post on social media are Tuesday and Thursday for LinkedIn, Wednesday for YouTube, Tuesday for Twitter, and Thursday for Facebook. The report also advises that it's best to post every day or at least four to six times a week, depending on whether you're a B2C or B2B brand. 

How important is the timing of posts and how does this apply to users that are not in your time zone? How can we better time our posts?

I think one of the things I'll just say about this entire report is that it’s very high level. You have to look at your target audience to know their workday cycles. Let's say one of your clients is in health care, the hours that they work are going to be drastically different than the hours of a high school student. That's why they're saying, for example, Tiktok, after 3 pm is a great time because they just got out of school, and they're just sitting on their phone. I think it's really important just to consider your target audience and understand when they might be engaging, and if they are engaging with social media. Then we put together a strategic plan around that. We utilize HubSpot’s social media calendar, and posting tools- it’s my favorite tool to use, but there are tons of other tools that are out there, like Sprout Social, or if you're more budget-conscious, Sked.

So what exactly should I be posting and how should I engage with my audience?

Mountains Wave, as a company, our brand is relatively small, the majority of the work that we get is word of mouth, or oftentimes through social media, which is funny because effectively that is word of mouth these days. In terms of engagement, and posting, the types of posts that do the best with our brand are the ones that have nothing to do with marketing. More about showing our personality, our passions, and things of that nature. One way to help build a community is by posting more about those personal topics. Eventually, people will remember Mountains Wave is the company with the great dog posts or that prioritizes mindfulness in the workplace when they're thinking about what agency they want to work with. That's gonna be a little bit more memorable than the top trends in marketing. Personally, I'm engaging the most on Twitter. I engage with other marketers, and other SaaS and B2B companies, all sorts of different people-  because I want to be part of that conversation, and I have something to add to it. That's led to a lot of opportunities for our organization. And that's just my personal Twitter. I don't necessarily think that a company's Twitter account needs to engage in that manner, but it's good practice if you have someone fully dedicated to it.

Thanks, Alex!

To connect with Alex on Twitter, click here.

To access the 2022 State of Inbound Marketing Report, click here.