by tradesmeninsights | Aug 21, 2013 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
I guess we haven’t talked about this for some time, but I’m seeing more and marketers reverting back to selling on social media platforms and complaining that social isn’t working for them. Should that surprise them?
I recently read a post by Jason Falls in Social Media Explorer that outlined Why Marketers Get Social Media Wrong. I don’t know if their management is putting pressure on them to sell more or what the problem is.
Here are a few tips from Jason’s post:
- Understand your audience – this is social and they probably aren’t there to solve the problems of the world.
- The audience, contrary to some opinion, is not there to buy.
- Social should nurture your brand – talk about experiences or solution to things you’re doing and hope for engagement.
You need to understand why the audience is participating in these networks. Don’t try to measure/compare to traditional channels because they’re apples and oranges.
by tradesmeninsights | Aug 14, 2013 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Tools, Marketing Trends, Social Marketing, Traditional Marketing
B-to-B marketers are always trying to identify more/better qualified leads. Does it surprise anyone that social media ranked very low in this category? The traditional methods of telemarketing, event marketing, webinars, trade shows, email marketing and yes, even direct mail pull better results according to a Survey in MarketingProfs from InsideSales.com
They surveyed 423 B-to-B Sales and Marketing professionals that cited that generating and improving leads was their biggest challenge.
I think sometimes we’re all so focused on the new tools available to us to generate leads that we forget about some of the old standbys.
I have found that we usually have more success using traditional marketing tools when it comes to actually generating good qualified leads.
What are you finding out that works best for you in a B-to-B environment?
by tradesmeninsights | Aug 7, 2013 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing, Traditional Marketing
As marketers, we have two challenges: one to create great content and two to deliver it. Recent studies have indicated that email still ranked among the top outreach channels to reach buyers no matter what stage they are in the buying cycle. Studies also show that emails should be integrated into other marketing tactics as well.
So knowing the emails are a viable way to deliver the message, we should probably spend some time on the other deliverable – relevant content!
Relevant content addresses the needs of a potential customer. It gives them options to solve a problem or gives them resources for them to investigate. Relevant content draws in potential customers.
According to an article in eMarketer, content creation was still the #1 challenge for them.
So our challenge is to give the reader WOW info every time, which is no small task. You should enlist the help of others within your company that have specific expertise to help develop relevant content.
Sales, engineering and customer service are certainly three places to start. They all are talking to either existing or potential customers and can readily identify issues that need to be addressed. By addressing them, you’re becoming that thought leader which should be one of your objectives.
The key to successful engagement comes in a variety of types of content.
A golden rule is, don’t put content out for the sake of having something out there. You should be looking for relevant stuff, not quantity.
by tradesmeninsights | Jul 31, 2013 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Tools, Marketing Trends, Social Marketing, Traditional Marketing
If you’re not utilizing this tool to reach the contractor and professional tradesman, you’re missing a great opportunity.
Some recent studies show that videos are on the rise in the B-to-B world. B-to-B Content Marketing: 2013 Benchmarks, Budget and Trends North America found that video had the largest increase of any market content in 2012.
Software Advice’s recent 2012 B-to-B demand generation survey found that video was the second most type of content used across channels.
I recently read a 3-part article in Content Marketing Institute by Mark Walker that outlined how to use video to drive awareness, leads and sales. He gives great tips on how to develop and execute a video strategy.
Here are some highlights:
- Define your purpose. What do you want to accomplish – educate, entertain, sell?
- Define your message. You’re better off doing targeted messages which will be shorter and on point. It’s better to do several short targeted videos than one catch-all one.
- Don’t overlook existing video. You might be surprised at what already exists on your products, training, etc.
- Leverage event’s show interviews, live demos, contractor interviews.
- Keep it short. 3-5 minutes is the ideal length to hold someone’s attention.
- Promote videos. Other than SEO, promote on your blog, website and social platforms, along with the appropriate tagging so folks can find you.
- Ask your Audience to share and make it easy for them to do.
Mark does an excellent job educating those who may not be familiar with all the ins and outs of videos.
If you like this post, you might like:
B-to-B Marketers: Are you Taking Advantage of Online Videos?
Busy Executives Prefer Videos Online
Make Videos Part of your Direct Marketing Plans to the Professional Tradesman
by tradesmeninsights | Jul 30, 2013 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Tools, Social Marketing
In today’s world where social media has become an integral part of our overall marketing plans, we can’t rely solely on the old standby of the Four P’s – Product, Price, Promotion and Place. We now have to learn how to manage and measure the brand influencers in social media marketing.
In an article in Convince and Convert by Danny Brown, he highlights ways to influence the customer with the Four M’s – Make, Manage, Monitor and Measure. He concludes that by incorporating the M’s and the P’s, we’ll be better serving the customer.
- The customer must be the center of our efforts. We need to find out what stage they are in the buying cycle and address the needs at that particular stage whether it’s information gathering or ready to buy.
- We need to manage the responses of the messages we send. Did they have a positive or negative impact?
- We need to monitor the relationship between the small core group. Who is the influence? What factors are coming into play?
- If we do all these we’ll be able to measure our influence on customers.
Danny Brown and Sam Fiorella have written a book, Influence Marketing, which I plan on reading. It certainly makes sense that by incorporating the old methods with the new it gives us better ways to communicate and measure.
by tradesmeninsights | Jul 25, 2013 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing
Today we have a post from Rachel Kerstetter, Sonnhalter’s PR Engineer, answering one of the questions she’s frequently asked and sharing some tips on how to use hashtags.
The basic mechanics of making a hashtag include putting a pound sign (#) in front of a word, phrase, acronym or combination of characters (but not punctuation).
But beyond calling attention to the words in a tweet, post or whatever, hashtags allow you to join into a more broad conversation. Hashtags have become a standard part of online conversation and stretch across many social platforms. Hashtags originated on Twitter and very recently Facebook added hashtag capabilities to the platform, but you can also use hashtags on: Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+ and newcomer Vine.
There are many ways to use hashtags, but they all boil down to participating in public conversation. Here are some common ways to use hashtags in marketing communications:
- Promote engagement during events. Whether your event is online or offline, it will have a presence. When you create your own hashtag (and publically identify it) you can then monitor and interact with the conversation around your event. Most conferences, trade shows, webinars and other events announce the “official” hashtag, put it on publicity materials and have a designated person using it. Mostly this happens on Twitter but permeates into other social media use.
- Host or take part in a Twitter chat. Twitter chats are a simple way to have a conversation with multiple people on the same topic. Chats are traditionally an hour and have a prescribed hashtag. Most chats happen weekly at the same time and center around a prepared set of questions, due to their growing popularity services have been created to help you participate more easily, for example Tweetchat is a Twitter application to organized the tweets on a hashtag and shows them in real time, allowing you to tweet in the action and pause the conversation to catch up.
- Run and follow a marketing campaign. If you have a campaign that will get people talking, adding a hashtag to it isn’t a bad idea. Often you’ll find ads that have hashtags to see more online.
- Contests. Hashtag-powered contests work the best for photos but can also be used for sharing experiences or answering a question. Just ask your fans/followers to post their entry using your hashtag.
- Research. See what people are saying or posting about a topic, brand, event or anything by searching hashtags. If you see a relevant topic hashtagged on your own feed, click it to see what else is being said.
If you still aren’t sure you’re ready to use hashtags, at least get your feet wet by identifying them when you see them and find out how they’re being used.
What are some ways that you’ve seen hashtags incorporated into marketing plans?
