Are You a Strategic or Tactical Thinker?

Strategic or Tactical, which is more important? It takes both to ensure a comprehensive marketing program. Most of us have no problem doing tactics since we can list the tasks and check them off.

Strategic thinking is another matter. It really sets the tone from which the tactics are identified and then implemented.

Jason Falls from Social Media Explorer summed it up very simply on what the difference is.

Strategy vs. Tactic Pyramid

Strategic thinking identifies who we are or who we want to be. What do we stand for?

Tactical identifies those things (what we do) in order to support our strategic thinking.

My biggest challenge is that I always tend to fall back on tactics because I can, in my own mind think that by checking off tasks, I’m accomplishing something. I guess I am, but it’s short-term.

The best way for me to make sense of both of them is that strategic is long-term and tactics are more short-term.

Do you have the same struggle with strategies like I do ?

I know we need both and we can’t have meaningful tactics until we have a strategy.

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It’s All About Business: A Straight Shooting Book on Social Media

No Bullshit Social Media by Jason Falls and Erik Deckers is true to its title.

They take the mystery out of it and explain in a no-nonsense way how to get the most out of Social if indeed you jump in.  And it’s about the ultimate goal – driving business.

This easy-to-read book highlights if you should be in social and how you should approach it if you are. Since they both come from the marketing side, they not only show practical examples of both BtoB and BtoC users, and how you can integrate social media into your overall strategy. Highlights include how to plan, implement and monitor.

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Generate Qualified Leads Using LinkedIn Answers

For those of you who follow me, you know that I’m a big advocate of LinkedIn for the B-to-B market. You also know that I believe it’s one of the most under-utilized social media sites.

I recently read a post by Jason Falls, How to Make LinkedIn Answers Part of Your Routine, that showed me yet another way to generate both thought leadership and leads. Under the “More” button at the top of your home page is where you’ll find the Answers tab. There are several industry categories you can choose to follow. Since I use Google Reader, I subscribed to the appropriate categories and had them sent to my reader via an RSS feed. I also created a folder called LinkedIn Answers.

Then every morning as I check  my reader, I quickly run through the Answers folder to see if there are any questions that I could contribute to. If so, I respond accordingly. I’ve only been doing this for a few weeks now, but it’s surprising the number of discussions I’ve been involved in that I would have missed if I hadn’t been using the Answer page.

I’m always learning new ways to take advantage of this powerful tool. Would you like to share ways you’re using LinkedIn?

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80% of Visitors to Your Blog are First-Timers!

Those of us who have been blogging for sometime may be under the assumption that once someone finds our blog they become a groupie and read every one of our posts. Well, here’s a wake up call.

Would you believe that 80% of the people who come to your site are first-timers?

This is true for most bloggers. Even the big boys like Jay Baer and Jason Falls have 65% plus who come to their sites for the first time. Jay Baer wrote a recent post, 5 Ways to Make Friends with Strangers on your Blog, where he outlines his suggestions on how to capitalize on your blog.

This comes from new research from Compendium Blogware (I recently attended a webinar from them) that shows that for more than two-thirds of corporate blogs, new visitors comprise more than 80% of blog traffic. So once your ego gets over the fact that the number of groupies following may not be as large as you thought, what do you plan on doing?

I’m a believer that the glass is half full and that this provides all of us with an opportunity to convert those first-timers to regulars. Here are some things you should consider doing:

  • Make your site easy to navigate – 80-95% of all clicks to your blog are organic which means they didn’t come directly to your URL.
  • Make sure your blog is focused – so the new reader can easily identify what it is you are focusing on and make it personal (put up your photo).
  • Keep talking about your key ideas over and over – Just because you wrote something last week, it doesn’t mean they see it especially with 80% plus being first-timers.
  • Keep them on your site by referring them back to other posts you have written on the same subject – this helps you build thought leadership quickly.
  • Make it easy to subscribe to your RSS feed – if they like what they’ve read, make it easy for them to read you regularly.

These are my thoughts. Do you have any to add?

Here are some other posts you might find interesting:

10 Engagement Tactics That Will Help B-to-B Marketers

Forrester Report: Most B-to-B Blogs Fail.

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B-to-B Marketers: What Type of Twitterer Are You?

People use Twitter for different reasons. From a B-to-B perspective, why do you? For those of us who are trying  to use Twitter as a marketing tool, you normally have a reason for using it. Twitter is a conversational platform. What kinds of conversations are you having?

I read a post recently from Jason Falls (a social media guy who I admire), Four styles of marketing on Twitter, and thought he hit it right on the head. Here are highlights of the Twitter styles:

Twitter Marketing Styles

Twitter Marketing Scale

  • Conversationalists – Want to use Twitter for business, but will participate in the daily conversations.
  • Conversational Marketer – Participate but with a stated purpose. They remind you of their newsletter or link you back to their blog.
  • The Salesman – Less conversational and more to the point of why they are here. These folks, even though they put sales first, still contribute good info and links to their followers.
  • The Broadcaster – Self promotion is the only reason they are there. They don’t participate in conversations and don’t contribute to the group.

So the question arises, what kind of Twitterer are you?

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