LinkedIn Groups: Your Blog Away From Blog

By Chris Ilcin, Account Superintendent, Sonnhalter

According to a recent survey from The Content Marketing Institute 89% of B2B Marketers use LinkedIn as a way to distribute content.

But if a potential customer isn’t already following you, all you’re doing by posting it to your company page is having a closed conversation with friends. While that’s good for strengthening relationships, it’s not an effective strategy for growing business, brand or thought leadership in your industry.

So, short of requiring all employees to share everything you post, what’s a marketer to do?

Join Groups.

If you’re not familiar with them, LinkedIn Groups are smaller “communities within the larger LinkedIn community where people and companies can connect by shared interest rather than work or personal connections.”

The advantage here is that instead of waiting for people to find you or your company, you can use your industry, process or other qualities to go out and find them.

How do you find the right group, and what do you do once you’ve found them? A lot of things you’re already doing. (more…)

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Making a Thought Leader

By Chris Ilcin, Account Superintendent, Sonnhalter

“Free advertising,” who doesn’t want that? One of the best side effects of the boom in content marketing is the growth of brand-neutral trade magazine articles. Pay-for-play has been relegated to the back burner as more and more publications see the benefit of offering knowledge-based problem solving articles.

That’s also an offshoot of the lack of skilled workers, as more and more knowledge retires, there’s an increased need to transfer that knowledge. With less opportunity for direct, apprentice-based, transfer, white papers, problem solving articles and general knowledge pieces gain added importance.

So, how can your company benefit? Create thought leaders. A bragging title most people would reject, it can still help you promote your business and create a knowledge warehouse.

How to Create Thought Leaders (more…)

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Is Your B-to-B Content Effective?

I think we all struggle with understanding ways to match content with the sales process to help the prospect through the sales funnel.

I recently read an article by Paul Gustafson about mastering effective B-to-B content. His points are thought leadership, content that’s easy to consume and the ability to listen to what the customer is saying.

B-to-B audiences can be demanding and we need to help the prospect through the sales funnel. At each stage we have the appropriate content to move them down the line.

sellingcyclechart

Thought leadership – you need to focus on 3 components:

Expertise

Original

Comprehensive

Teaser content – pique the interest to refine audience, and then when you have them hooked, you can engage them with more meaningful content.

Listening and engaging – give your audience an opportunity to respond. Then listen and react. More comments mean more discussions.

Paul leaves us with a final thought:

Effective B-to-B social content starts and ends with thought leadership. The resulting social engagement can refine that voice, strengthen your future content and expand your audience base.”

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Why Are You Afraid of Starting a Blog?

I bet for most of you it’s that you’re afraid you won’t be able to publish relevant content on a regular basis. I’m the first to admit starting a blog is a commitment, but one that’s well worth it.

Your blog can be the center of your social media plan where you can repurpose posts to your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. We have found that consistent posts have helped us become the thought leader in marketing to the professional tradesman and have generated new clients from it.

Since content is usually the stumbling block to starting a blog, here are some suggestions on where and how you can get good content. You need to realize you don’t have to write everything. You need to be the “go-to” resource for your niche, so utilize other experts.

  • Try to do one original post a week.
  • Supplement other posts by sharing industry/association news with your insights.
  • Set up a Google Reader account where you can send RSS feeds of people you want to read on a regular basis and repost their articles with commentary and insights from your point of view.
  • Case studies and testimonials – Get your sales staff involved. These are great stories and it’s great when customers tell, in their own words, how you helped them solve a problem.
  • Stats/surveys – folks love to get industry info or trends. Start your own survey and share the results. It’s a great way of getting a conversation going.
  • Look internally – some of your best resources might just be down the hall. Talk with sales, customer service and engineering. They probably can give you more topics and issues to talk about than anyone else, and it’s relevant to your industry.

Those are some suggestions for getting great content, and don’t think you need to be the sole source of content. Make it a team effort.

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What’s The Purpose of Your Blog?

This month marks three years since I started blogging on Tradesmeninsights.com. With over 500 posts in the system and over 500 followers who are signed up for my monthly newsletter, I thought I’d reflect a bit on what’s come out of all my efforts over the past three years.

If you’re doing a blog or thinking about starting one, make sure you identify the objectives and expectations at the onset.

Our objective when starting the blog was to talk to those interested in reaching the professional tradesmen and ways you could do that. We also wanted to help educate our target audience (manufacturers) on ways they could integrate social media tools into their marketing mix since most of them were very traditional on how they approach things and didn’t like change.

I can remember back in the mid 90s when websites were the big thing and how even back then manufacturers were the last group to come to the party. For those of you who have been around long enough, you will remember those days. Can you image a business today without a website?

To become a thought leader in marketing to the professional tradesmen was our primary goal. We knew that if folks like you (by the way, if you’re a regular, thanks for sticking around) got benefit out of my babblings, we would eventually connect and might even do some business.

We have established dialogs with several folks and have been fortunate to start doing business with several of them. It’s gratifying to be at a trade association meeting or shows and be introduced to people who know who we are because of the blog. And oh, by the way, we are getting business from our blog which was one of our other objectives.

If you do a blog,  make sure you have clear objectives and an audience that wants to learn more.

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