This week it was the B2B Marketing annual "Ignite" conference bringing together some of the biggest Business-to-Business brands in the world and some of the most influential marketers in those organisations.

I was just checking my notes from my top 3 sessions and saw a few key themes emerging worth taking note of and a few other top tips from leading marketeers:

1. Annabel Rake, CMO at Deloitte:

Talking about the Future of Work, she said that going forward we need "Lifelong Reinvention".  In other words, we used to learn and then work but in today's world we need to be constantly learning and reinventing ourselves.  The ability to communicate is going to be more vital than ever, which as she said, is good news for marketers, but made me think more widely about all those other poor souls in our organisations who can find communicating a real challenge.  What are they going to do and how can we, as their marketers, help them communicate more effectively?

She also pointed out the importance of having a strong personal brand which is something we at Passle talk to our clients about every day.  Indeed, at all B2B organisations, the brand of the company is only as strong as the brand of all of those personal brands of the employees.  Build each of the individual personal brands and the company brand will soar.

2. Lucy Steers, Head of Marketing at Hymans Robertson:"Authenticity is at the heart of modern communications".  Giving the experts in your organisation a voice will help demonstrate that authenticity and build those personal brands.

  Like Annabel Rake, Lucy talked of the importance of our personal brands.  To do this effectively we have to be ourselves and be authentic when looking to build our personal brands online.  A quote I often show when talking with clients is by Rupert Younger , Director, Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation who said:

3. Jason Miller, Head of Content and Social Media Marketing at LinkedIn:  

In a high energy presentation Jason talked about how LinkedIn use LinkedIn for marketing!  He told us that the websites and companies that are "winning" are those that have "strong authoritative content".  He mentioned 4 key content types (unfortunately he was only given a 30 minute slot and should have been given a 90 minute slot so he only really managed to talk in detail about content type 1 and a little on number 2. 3 and 4 will have to wait until next time):

1. "Big Rock Content" - we call that Hero content here at Passle.  These are the big evergreen pieces of content.  Jason told us to extract every bit of value from that content using both paid and organic reach.  One key tip I took from him was to get people to pre-order this free content!  e.g. launch it 4 weeks before you bring it out and get people to register now.  This has worked really well for LinkedIn because people love the exclusivity
2. Blog and Insights - Jason said that these are increasing in importance all the time and that we should test some paid media behind them.  We have seen here at Passle the huge impact it can have for a B2B company when you get the voice of your experts out into the market and in front of that small number of key individuals you are looking to influence
3. Video
4. Podcast

To find out more about what Jason talked about on advertising on LinkedIn and how to generate more leads from the platform it's well worth reading one of his pieces of Rock Content "Read me if you want to advertise better on LinkedIn"