Integrating Social Media in B2B Marketing - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #86
There’s a lot buzz around social media moving into our world of B2B Marketing and how are we going to leverage it for our own agendas. Almost every day now I hear of a new social media platform or tool, a viral success story, or a frustrated Marketer trying to figure out how to make it ‘work’ for their business. Just today my friend, Jennifer Horton, a fellow B2B Marketer and a Best Practice consultant at Eloqua, also intrigued and inspired by this new social media world, forwarded me a GREAT blog post from Brian Solis I wanted to share with all of you.
Check it out, there are lots of good thoughts here.
http://www.briansolis.com/2007/06/future-of-communications-manifesto-for.html
April 7th, 2008 | No Comments » |
He’s Singin’ My Tune - Marketing WTF?
Need a little entertainment with your SEO tutorial? Check out this little ditty by the Poetic Prophet (AKA The SEO Rapper). Poetic, or should I call him Prophet, raps about how web design affects the ranking and conversion of web pages. Yo MTV raps SEO and shares these bits of wisdom “use a clear call to action to cause da temptation.” “Design and code right man, can’t you get wid it?”
April 4th, 2008 | No Comments » |
Twitter = TMI - Marketing WTF?
Twitter is such an awesome app for driving readers to your blog and keeping friends posted about your activities. But, sometimes the posts simply blow my mind. This is one for the TMI files http://twitter.com/chrisheuer. Now, on the Gallup Strengths Finder scale (http://www.bemyastrologer.com/strengthsfinder.html), I’m a Relator, so I totally get sharing lots of details about your life with others. Maybe that’s why I blog. But, man oh man, nothing like sharing these intimate details with 1500 of your closest friends.
Seriously, we’re all glad the tests came back negative, Chris.
April 2nd, 2008 | No Comments » |
April Fools from The B2B Lead
In case you haven’t already figured it out, we played a little April Fools joke today. Google is not partnering with Second Life (unless we had some sort of unknown psychic premonition, or maybe we just gave them a great idea). We hope you enjoyed us having a little fun. We are always up for trying something new to drive more blog traffic.
April 1st, 2008 | 1 Comment |
Google Finds Nirvana Through Second Life - Marketing WTF?
In a bold move designed to fortify itself as THE King of All Advertising in both the real world and the virtual world, rumor has it Google will be announcing an exclusive agreement with Linden Research, Inc. (aka Linden Lab), the creators of the wildly popular online world Second Life, to become the premiere advertising medium within the virtual world. Code-named “Narnia”, the agreement details a two-pronged advertising strategy that will enable Google’s PPC-based AdWords technology to be ascribed to any assets within Second Life, including the Avatars themselves. The second and most interesting component of the agreement provides for the ability to “bridge” PPC advertisements and landing page interactivity between the “real world” and Second Life. Imagine an Adwords-enabled billboard in Second Life promoting a new sports car that, when clicked on, draws the user back onto the advertiser’s web site on the Internet, and vice versa.
What’s next? Is salesforce.com going to start tracking virtual leads? Are marketing automation vendors like Eloqua, Marketo, Vtrenz, and LoopFuse going to start allowing you to track virtual marketing campaigns to Second Life Avatars? If so, how will all of this integrate with our tracking and social media tools?
This is perfect timing for ReachForce, as we just announced our Convert software-as-a-service enabling businesses to turn web visitors into active leads, whether traditional or virtual.
April 1st, 2008 | 1 Comment |
Social Media is Not One-Size-Fits-All - Blog Master…NOT
Last week, we hosted a B2B Marketing Roundtable in Austin on Social Media. It was great to see what other marketers are doing with social media. Some were very advanced with huge customer communities while other were still trying to figure out how best to integrate social media into their overall marketing strategy. It seems, overall, executives are aware of social media but do not completely understand it. If you are feeling pressure from your bosses to start a blog or user community because it is the hot thing right now, you should really sit back and analyze what tactic would be best.
One attendee said she was supposed to be starting a user community but they only have 70 customers. For most companies a user community is a lot of time, effort and money for only 70 customers especially when you consider that only a fraction of customers will actually be active in the community. Knowing your customer is also something to consider when deciding to start a blog. Some companies believe that blogs today are what websites were 5 years ago, you just have to have one. The truth is they are a lot of effort. If your customers and prospects are not active online, starting a blog is probably not a good idea. The point? Research and know your customers’ behavior before launching any social media program.
March 31st, 2008 | 1 Comment |
Website Visitors - Leads or Just Impressions - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #85
We all know that as B2B marketers we must manage our online presence well. The first step is having an easy-to-navigate and information-rich website. Then we try to find new ways to drive traffic by investing in banner ads, Google AdWords, SEO or by using sponsored whitepapers and participating in social media through Facebook or LinkedIn. In addition, we have all spent real dollars on landing pages. Many of us have also taken on a company blog to indirectly promote our agenda and promote ourselves as thought leaders. We do all of these things with the feeling in mind of “if we’re out there they will come”. What happens once you get them to your home page or landing pages? We try our best to capture as many leads online as possible, but with only 1% of web visitors filling out a form and only half of those being accurate, don’t you wonder about the other 99%?
My view is that AdWords and other PPC marketing techniques are B2C optimized and that we as B2B marketers have to work harder (in new ways) to try to monetize these investments – not just stop on impressions but on the entire value chain of the investment as it translates to real revenue.
As more and more marketers are having to show real results for marketing dollars spent, is measuring web traffic enough? Seeing a spike in your website traffic is exciting and being able to correlate that spike to a press release, change in a Google AdWords/PPC program, or an email campaign proves that your tactics are working. But are website visitors any different than people driving past a billboard? Are they just impressions?
I want to capture the people not just visiting the homepage, but the ones who spend time on my product pages, looking at my case studies and reading my white papers. And I want to weed out those that just look at my careers page or press releases. To me, online marketing is important but lead generation that drives real revenue is priceless, so how can I convert more web visitors into actionable leads?
March 26th, 2008 | 3 Comments |
Measuring the Effectiveness of Your Corporate Blog - Blog Master…NOT
Companies create blogs for different reasons. Some use it as a tool to communicate with their customers. Others try to leverage their blog for lead generation. Some use it to supplement their PR strategy. Whatever the reason, all companies should have set metrics to follow in order to track the effectiveness of their blog. I just read a great MarketingProf’s article by Mack Collier (this one does require a premium membership, but I highly recommend it).
To give you a recap of what Mack suggests, there are three major metrics to track:
- Traffic
- Feed Subscribers
- Links
Traffic can be easily tracked using a tool like Google Analytics. You can use traffic measurements to help you determine what subjects are being read the most, what days of the week you get the most traffic and if outside activities like a press release or commenting on another blog gave you a boost.
Feed subscribers are different than traffic and will not count as part of your traffic. You may actually see your traffic decrease as your readers find your content to be valuable and subscribe to your RSS. Feedburner is a tracking tool for feeds and offers a few other benefits as well. (Just as an FYI is owned by Google now.)
You can track your links through Technorati or Google Blog Search. This will help you determine which topics resonate the best with your readers and will help you to create relationships with other bloggers.
March 25th, 2008 | 1 Comment |
Death of Email Marketing; Long Live Email Marketing - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #84
I was just reading my ‘daily dose’ of eMarketer and saw these statistics and thought it would be useful to share them with the readers of our Blog.
The interesting view here is personalization. Now here are a few questions to ponder,
- Are these “spray and pray” e-mail campaigns or targeted?
- What would these metrics look like if they were targeted to the right person?
- What happens as the economy continues to drift and budget cuts come after marketing dollars, what stays, what goes?
- Is lead generation mission critical to your business? If not, why not?
What rates are you seeing out there?
I just spoke with Amy Hawthorne, our Lead Generation Guru and she said her campaign this week had a 10% click through rate and 30% open rate. WOW!
March 20th, 2008 | No Comments » |
Want Bloggers to Write About You? Make Sure Your Website is Blogger-Friendly - B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #83
Attention Conservation Notice: The following post shares a few counter-intuitive tips for getting bloggers to write about you.
Cory Doctorow – the genius behind Boing Boing, and the inspiration behind ReachForce’s attention conservation notices–has shared more of his brilliance in 17 TIPS FOR GETTING BLOGGERS TO WRITE ABOUT YOU.
If you can get past the InformationWeek’s annoying, in-your-face advertising and survey requests, you will find several great nuggets in this post. Many of which will really throw most marketers for a loop. Here are a few of the more interesting suggestions:
- Have a permanent link. Don’t just change the front page of your site every time a new speaker for your speaker-series in announced. A blogger who links to the front page of your site today in a post about the upcoming address by Philo T Farnsworth, wants that link to stay good for in the future,
- PDFs stink. It’s not a Web page (see “Have a link”). It’s hard to copy and paste out of. It doesn’t show up in browsers half the time. The Web is made of HTML.
- Put your URL on your images. If you’ve got cool photos or other images up on your site, stick your URL in unobtrusive type at the bottom of it.
- Forget the “copyright protection” Javascript. Some sites have bizarre Javascript that pops up snotty little copyright messages when you try to right-click on an image to save it. OK, we get the point: you don’t want people to copy your images. We’ll just move on. Enjoy your obscurity.
- Enough with the legal boilerplate. If every page on your site ends with “(c) 2008 Paranoid Co Inc, all rights reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced without permission,” then bloggers may just take you at your word and write about someone else’s site.
The world of Marketing has changed drastically in the last few years and it’s time for B2B Marketers to question the status quo (and their legal counsel) and make some changes to thrive in this new world.
March 19th, 2008 | No Comments » |
