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 | Mar 6, 2012 | Marketing Trends, Social Marketing
We all are getting into social media in some fashion. Some more active than others, but how are we doing and what do we think of this new media?
Penton Media just released a B-to-B Marketing study called, Truth from the Trenches that surveyed 3,000-plus folks like us.
What they found is very interesting. The study drives home some alarming points on how many of us are less than satisfied with the performance of our website, social, search marketing and sales conversion efforts. Here are a few of the highlights I found interesting:
- 81% of B2B marketers find online marketing moderately to extremely challenging.
- 77% said their websites are not effective at generating leads.
- 63% of them are either vaguely aware or not aware of what is being said about them online.
- 35% don’t think social media is critical for their business.
On the positive side:
- 60% have implemented a social media strategy or will in the next year.
- 90% are active on Facebook.
- 53% are active on Twitter.
So what do you think? Any of these hit home?
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?
by tradesmeninsights | Feb 28, 2012 | Marketing Tools, Marketing Trends, Social Marketing, Traditional Marketing
We all know how busy contractors and the trades are. Most of their time is spent on the job site. They rely on their smartphones, and more and more are using tablets in the field. Mobile is not going away. Consider this stat:
77% of the world’s population (5.3 billion people) are mobile subscribers!
A recent post on Marketo, BtoB Marketing To Go: Why Mobile is Crucial to Your Lead Generation, highlights some interesting stats from a recent comScore study:
- 72.2 million people accessed social networking sites or blogs on their mobile devices.
- Almost 40 million U.S. mobile users access social media sites daily.
- Facebook,Twitter and LinkedIn increased their mobile audiences by more that 50% in 2011.
So what do you think the chances are that some of your target audience isn’t in the stats above? Mobile users are interacting with brands and you should not miss out on the opportunity to engage them.
If you like this post, you may want to read:
Is Mobile Marketing the Best Way to Reach the Professional Tradesman?
What’s Your Mobile Media Strategy for 2012?
by tradesmeninsights | Feb 23, 2012 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Tools, Marketing Trends, Social Marketing
Some of you may have already jumped into Google+. According to recent stats, as of January 2012, there are over 90 million users (Twitter has 100 million active users). To put this in perspective, they launched Google+ by invitation in June of 2011 and opened it up to the public in September of 2011. Google is positioning Google+ as their Facebook for B-to-B.
Google+ is a great content sharing platform, and building an audience on it may be one of the smartest things you do as a content marketer according to a recent post by Brian Clark on copyblogger, Why Google+ is an Inevitable Part of Your Content Marketing Strategy. Here are two highlights on why:
- Google+ is a part of Google – they do a good job integrating with Google docs, Chrome, Google Reader, Gmail and YouTube.
- Search – Google is the king of search and now they announced the Search, plus your world which merges personalized search with social search.
Brian also discusses concerns about Google having a stranglehold on the market and what we might expect moving forward.
The key for those of us who write content is to understand the language of our audience and make sure we reflect that in our content. Search will do the rest.
If you like this post, you might want to read:
Suggestions on How to Make Sense of Google+
Google+ and B-to-B: How to Get Started
