by tradesmeninsights | Apr 3, 2012 | Marketing Tips, Traditional Marketing
I’m sure you’ll answer yes, but are you talking with them or at them? We all assume that email or phone calls are the best way to communicate with your customers. I’m surprised when I ask our clients that question that it’s based on their assumptions on how their customers wanted to be contacted.
It’s interesting that we all want to build relationships and engage our customers, but if you think about it, you’re doing it on your terms not necessarily on theirs.
Here’s what I’d suggest. Have your customer service department contact your customer base and ask them how they want to be contacted (most of this can be done on regular inbound calls), for example, regarding new products or new training that’s available. You may be surprised at their answers.
For new products, they may want a one-on-one with their salesman, and for training, they may want to be contacted by email. They should touch most of your customers in a normal period of a month or so, and for those that are reached from inbound calls, start an outbound campaign to those that haven’t purchased for some time. It will give your customer service people a reason to reach out, and who knows, they might even sell something!
I’m assuming you’re working with some sort of CRM system that can be updated, and when new things come up that need to be shared, you have a better chance of getting that message out if you deliver it the preferred way the customer wants.
Give it a try and let me know how it works for you.
by tradesmeninsights | Mar 21, 2012 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Tools, Social Marketing, Traditional Marketing
The job of marketing today isn’t to create new customers but to create passionate subscribers to our brand. Your community will take charge and social networking will continue to facilitate the power shift towards the consumer. Our challenges are to make a person stop, read, think and behave differently.
Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute and known as the Godfather of Content Marketing, describes it “as a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience with the objective of driving profitable actions.” Does that sound like something we should be doing?
Roper Public Affairs says that 80% of business decision makers prefer to get company info in a series of articles vs. advertisements. 70% say content marketing makes them feel closer to the sponsoring company, while 60% say company content helps them make better product decisions.
So how do we manage this thing called content management? I found a good book by Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi called Managing Content Marketing that might be a helpful tool for your marketing team to read. They outline and focus on 5 areas:
- Understand YOU – What makes you different? You need to define this before writing content to support it.
- Understand THEM – Who and where are the communities you’re serving?
- What content can you provide to help build loyalty?
- Subscribers need to be fed, nurtured and unsubscribed when it’s time.
- Measure success.
Content marketing is a different way to get the same information in front of customers, and we all need help and tools to manage it better.
We did a webcast with Joe Pulizzi on content marketing that might be of interest to you. You can watch it here.
by tradesmeninsights | Mar 20, 2012 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Tools, Social Marketing
LinkedIn has always been one of my best sources of activity to my blog. It also allows me to network with others who have the same interest in groups that I join, and I can always count on input from those who are linked with me if I need something or a question answered.
That’s why it wasn’t a big surprise to me when a recent study by HubSpot said that LinkedIn generated the highest visitor to lead conversion rate of 2.74%, almost 3 times higher than both Twitter and Facebook.
I guess that shows me that the people who are on LinkedIn are there for business purposes and are looking to network. So here are some tips on how to leverage LinkedIn:
- Invest the time – develop and nurture your community. Don’t post something for the sake of posting. If you don’t have good content, wait until you do.
- Focus content on what’s working – if blog posts are getting the most traffic, concentrate on doing more of them. If webinars or podcasts create more activity, focus on them.
- Don’t forget lead generation content – call-to-action items need to be included in the mix so you’re continually inviting people to engage.
- Keep learning – don’t take any success for granted. Keep working to improve your content.
Those are some of my thoughts. What are you doing to take advantage of LinkedIn?
by tradesmeninsights | Mar 13, 2012 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Tools, Social Marketing, Traditional Marketing
As B-to-B marketers, we are concerned about demand generation as our fundamental mission with lead generation being the primary way of measuring success. Here are four ways that will help you get better results.
I read an interesting article by Jim Leach, VP-Marketing, Harris Corp that outlines the CORE items you need to focus on. Here are some highlights:
- Content – You have two challenges here for creating great content. One, the people who probably know the most about your product are probably terrible writers and two, your audience has no time to read. Jim suggests that a product engineer or possibly a customer service person might be the ones to tap to write content. His rules are simple: be brief, be brilliant, and be gone.
- Outreach – Your best source of info is from your sales force. They are out in the trenches every day and know what the pain points are for customers and potentials. Take those insights and turn them into content nugget one pagers with common themes that might be used in a drip marketing program.
- Response – Don’t lead your potential back to your home page on the web where they have to start the search over for the particular item that interested them in the first place. Create specific landing pages with tailored messages and the ability to collect info and download valuable info depending on where they are on the sales ladder – awareness, research, evaluation, selection or purchase – you should have items on that page that address each step in the process so the potential can find what they want easily.
- Engagement – Most B-to-B sales have longer buying cycles so you need to keep your prospect engaged throughout the process. Make sure that when they come back at you with questions to be sure to ask them some as well so you can continually update their status.
CORE marketing can help you focus your efforts and close more sales. What are you doing to improve your marketing results?
by tradesmeninsights | Mar 7, 2012 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
Now that we’ve crossed over into another year, are you reviewing what you did last year and trying to make improvements?
I ran across a paper by Radian6 (you can download it when you click) that highlighted 30 ideas to think about to include in your planning. They included ideas on strategy, listening, engagement and measurement. I’ve always respected them and their content.
Here are some points that hit home to me:
- Socialize your culture, not just your technology. Your whole organization needs to adapt to empowered customer model.
- Cultivate long-term relationships. It’s 5-10 times cheaper than getting a new client.
- Pay attention to people talking about your brand. Listen and tag both advocates and detractors.
- Great leaders listen.
- It’s not enough to listen in the shadows.Your fans expect you to respond and start conversations.
Those are some of the ideas I’m going to try to work on this year. What are you planning on doing to improve your social media plan?
by tradesmeninsights | Feb 29, 2012 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Tools, Social Marketing
Doing a blog is a major commitment and lots of us haven’t pulled the trigger for just that reason. But I’m sure you’ve got good content to share, but how do you do it?
Jeffrey Cohen had an interesting post on socialmediab2b.com, 6 Ways to Create and Share B2B Social Media Content Without a Blog that I found to be interesting. You can house great content on your website and use links in social networks to bring them your info. Highlights from Jeff’s post include:
- Email – When you’re at a trade show or industry conference, take notes of highlights and send them to your customer/client contact list.
- YouTube – Shoot a quick video (use your phone) with a product manager highlighting one key feature of a product. Post on your YouTube channel and share a link on social sites.
- LinkedIn – Post status updates. These will be visible to all those who follow you.
- Google+ – Great place to have conversations and ask leading questions, not to mention the benefits of search results.
So you see, there are other ways to get your presence and expertise out in the marketplace. What are you doing to enhance your expertise?
I’m sure you’ll answer yes, but are you talking with them or at them? We all assume that email or phone calls are the best way to communicate with your customers. I’m surprised when I ask our clients that question that it’s based on their assumptions on how their customers wanted to be contacted.