by tradespeopleinsights | May 12, 2009 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
In today’s economy, you won’t find any marketer that isn’t looking for a better ROI.
I recently read a post by Modern B2B Marketing, sharing some insights as to best practices from some of the industry leaders. I couldn’t say it any better, so here are the top 5 tips that will help you increase your ROI:
1. Be Found — “According to a recent study by Marketing Sherpa, 80% of B2B purchasing decision makers say that they found the vendor when they were ready to buy, rather than responding to a vendor finding them,” answered WebMarket Central’s Tom Pick.
This is coming to be known as inbound marketing. It boils down to ensuring that you have content spread across the web wherever your prospect may be looking, and that your web site is optimized so that prospects can easily find you regardless of where they are in the buying cycle.
2. Implement Lead Nurturing — “Lead nurturing is having consistent and meaningful communication with viable customers regardless of their time to purchase. One of the speakers at a conference recently said, ‘someone is a lead for life.’ I would agree with that sentiment,” said Brian Carroll, author of the popular book, “Lead Generation for the Complex Sale.”
Combined with lead scoring, lead nurturing programs enable you to profile the behavior of those most interested in your company’s goods or services, keep in touch with prospects until they are ready to buy, build preference for your brand, and in some cases, accelerate your customers’ buying cycles.
3. Create Content That Compels Your Prospects To Buy — A compelling video from your CEO may be just what it takes to convince your prospect to buy from you. From white papers and email to blogs and podcasts, there are several ways to share your message in an engaging way, as detailed in our interview with Craig Rosenberg, Vice President of Products and Services at Tippit, Inc. If your goal is to increase the ROI of your marketing efforts, the key is to create and promote content targeted to be relevant to buyers at each stage of your funnel.
4. Integrate Everything — Your prospects don’t just visit web sites. They go to events, enter social media discussions, read blogs, and so on. Amy Hawthorne, Director of Marketing at B2B lead generation company ReachForce, said that your prospects don’t exist in silos, and your marketing efforts shouldn’t either.
When you determine the types of content that will compel your prospects to engage and eventually purchase, promote it on your web site, on your blog, in social discussions, or anywhere else your prospects are spending their time.
5. It All Comes Down To Testing — Nearly every thought leader I spoke with insists on testing. There are potentially hundreds of channels for you to push your marketing message and thousands of combinations of elements for your web site. The best testing programs are ongoing and can include everything from “offer tests,” which experiment with varying pieces of fulfillment, to testing various elements of a web site including images and navigation. The goal of testing is to predict what combination of channels, offers and elements will be most profitable.
Marketing automation can help immensely with the effort it will take to implement the tips above, particularly as they relate to lead nurturing and lead management. By properly implementing the advice offered by our B-to-B Marketing Thought Leaders, you will soon be heading up a detailed and profitable marketing program.
by tradespeopleinsights | May 11, 2009 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Trends, Social Marketing
A report by Forrester Research found that most corporate blogs kept by business-to-business (B2B) firms failed to energize their intended audiences and engage them in meaningful conversations about trends and products.
Corporate bloggers are apparently struggling to sustain a conversation, while many B2B marketers are failing to realize that good blogging style should resemble a coffee shop conversation, not a whitepaper.
As a result, most B2B blogs are dull, drab, and don’t stimulate discussion, according to the Forrester report.
More than 70% of the corporate blogs it reviewed stick strictly to business or technical topics and don’t share much personal insight or experience.
74% of B2B blogs receive a minimum of commentary or trackbacks because readers fail to find conversations worthy of their involvement.
Successful blogging, Forrester insists, is not a one-way street, but most corporate bloggers yak away about their companies and products, seemingly oblivious to whether their audience is listening or not.
56% of blogs we examined simply regurgitate company news or executive views, while relatively fewer blogs work to establish thought leadership by enlisting internal experts–with deep, specific knowledge of a particular topic–as their primary blog authors.
“B2B marketers should embrace strategies prominently used by mainstream bloggers to attract readers, build conversations, and engage community members in sharing their experiences with their online peers, the report’s author advises.”
If you can’t get excited about what you do, then please don’t start a blog. It takes time and commitment, and without passion, it’s going to be impossible to move it forward. Your readers will soon spot the lack of passion in what you write.
This isn’t a school project that you do for a set period of time and then it’s done. It’s an ongoing dialog with your audience and it takes planning and managing content and having the right contributors. If you’re organized and have a road map of where you’re going, it will lessen the daily time commitment each of us has. I’ve said in other posts that if you can’t allow 1-2 hours a day to your blog, then don’t do it or find someone who can.
Lee Odden recently gave a presentation, Tips For Better Business Blogging, where he outlines 4 tips for developing a successful blog:
- Develop a practical purpose for your blog
- Plan your editorial and source content
- Socialize by utilizing Facebook, Twitter, Trackbacks to generate traffic
- Measure and promote success to that committee
Conclusion: Social media isn’t going away and businesses will sooner or later figure that out. The key is those that do it first will have a competitive advantage.
Have you had a similar experience you’d like to share?
by tradespeopleinsights | May 7, 2009 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
I keep reminding folks that other than disseminating good information, the #1 goal in my mind is to identify and engage in a conversation with either a customer or potential.
Questions are a great way to give your readers a sense of belonging to a community.
People who have this sense tend to come back for more since they feel a part of your blog. Reader responses give you a gage on your topics as to their relevance and gives you content for future follow-up posts.
I read a post recently from Darren Rowse, Ask a question: 10 reasons why questions work & 12 tips on how to ask them, that gives a good overview. Here are 7 of the top tips:
- Keep your questions relevant to the topic.
- Ask questions that builds on a previous post.
- Ask questions readers will want to know the answer to.
- Give them some options to get the discussion going.
- Use a poll tool to give readers a vote.
- Ask some controversial questions.
- Be willing to share your answer.
Questions initiate conversations, so what do you think?
by tradespeopleinsights | May 5, 2009 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
I’ve written previously that one of the primary objectives of a blog is to engage readers. Unfortunately, we sometimes get so focused on our message and making our blog stand out that we forget about our audience, the people reading our posts. These folks bring new insights and ideas to our posts and provide us with the opportunity for dialogue and feedback .
Here’s an idea: Why not recognize a reader and give them their 15 seconds of fame.Yes, you heard me right, make it about them.
If you create a space or regular column highlighting some of your readers, you accomplish both the benefit of acknowledging that your readers have something to contribute, but it also shows other readers that you value their opinion as well even though you only recognize a few.
A recent post by Darren Rowse, Pay special attention to a reader, outlines 8 ways to highlight your readers. Here are some highlights:
- Promote a comment to a post. When a reader makes a good point, recognize them and talk about their comment.
- Write a post about their blog. Check out some of the blogs of people who share your ideas and write an unpaid review of their blog on what you like about it.
- Send your readers to comment on others blogs. Write a post that links people to another site and ask them to comment on the other person’s site.
- Give readers opportunity to promote themselves. Run a contest/project that gives readers an opportunity to promote themselves.
- Reader of the week. Highlight a reader once a week, say on a Friday.
- Projects/competition. Invite readers to post blogs and share a link with others.
- Run a reader poll. Then highlight it in a follow-up post.
- Invite guest posts. A great way to get another perspective as well as giving someone else the opportunity to have an impact on your blog.
Those are some ideas. What have you found that works?
by tradespeopleinsights | May 4, 2009 | Marketing Tools
Facebook now has over 200 million active users. More than 100 million users log on to Facebook at least once a day.
The INSIDECRM blog provides a comprehensive list of 100 tools and tips that will help your company maximize the marketing opportunities available through Facebook.
This is a great resource list that will make Facebook part of your company’s social media marketing mix for new business:
- Learn why Facebook has rapidly become the go-to networking site for marketers. Learn about the current and future advertising opportunities on Facebook.
- Learn about the endless ways you can use Facebook to promote your company at no costs. Use your creativity and marketing mind to maximize these features.
- Learn about the tools and applications, add-on features for Facebook, that will allow you to customize your profile and fan pages to build relationships with clients and prospective clients.
- Learn how to narrow down your target audience through researching Facebook’s demographics. Learn to tailor your social media new business strategy through “How-to Guides” to help fully utilize Facebook.
- Learn the benefits of Facebook from this list of tools and tips.
Bookmark and read, The Facebook Marketing Toolbox: 100 Tools and Tips to Tap the Facebook Customer Base
by tradespeopleinsights | Apr 30, 2009 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
Why promote your blog? Just because you write the most provocative post, it doesn’t mean the world at large will know it’s even out there. Yet by using the right key words and phrases, you’ll get organic action from the search engines, and if you spend a little more time being proactive, you’ll see even better results.
Here are 5 quick tips to help promote your posts:
- Email Signatures. Add a link to your blog especially of recent posts. Have you ever thought of how many e-mails you send out a day (not to mention all the other people at your company)? What a great way to let people know you have a blog. Most of your correspondence is either going to customers, prospects or vendors, all of which should have a vested interest in your topics.
- Social Networking. Hopefully you belong to Facebook, Twitter, etc. Leverage these by promoting your posts. The object is to have your friends and followers spread the good news. The key is to give them something worth sharing!
- Internal Links. Sometimes we’re so focused on promoting our posts on other sites that we lose site of the most obvious place to be linked internally. Hopefully you’ve written content on a similar topic or market before, so add a link. It keeps people on your site longer and helps build your credibility as an expert. I have all my posts broken into 3 categories: Trends, Tools and Tips and link back appropriately.
- E-newsletters. If you have a list, send out an e-mail promoting some of your key posts. If you don’t have a list, start one as that’s blogging 101.
- Pitch Other Bloggers. This is an important one, but not so easy to accomplish. Like anything else, you need to establish a relationship with other bloggers. Read their stuff to make sure you’re compatible. Make comments on their posts. Link back to some of their posts when appropriate. Blogging is like any other referral network. People need to know, like and trust you before they recommend you. And when you think you’re ready, suggest versus ask them to consider linking.
Daren Rowse provides additional insights to promoting your post that you might find helpful: 11 ways to increase your chances of being linked to by a blogger.
