B2B Marketing Blog

Now that your company uses social media to interact with current and potential clients, do you know if you are saying the right things, and whether you are using the correct tone to get your message across to the other side?

If you already use Twitter or Facebook personally, you know they can be a soapbox for everyone’s personal opinions, and flights of fancy. When tweeting for your business however, it is a good idea to have a plan in place for what you want to say about your company. You want your tone to be consistent, message to be clear and your intent be transparent.

Tips on doing it right

1. Always have something interesting and useful to share. Some ideas would be product updates, whitepaper announcements and general advice.  In the world of B2B, chances are your followers would want to hear what you have to say for the subject you are an expert in.
2. Give extra care to the grammar and the language, as that will indicate the image that you’d like to give to your company.

How to do it with limited resources?
While it may be tempting to hire a family friend, or delegate social networking to an intern, you should use caution when lending the voice of your company to someone who is not the CEO or the owner. Hiring a social media expert is an option that some companies have employed, and with many business owners being too busy to regularly update things like blogs, Facebook or Twitter. This option can be expensive for small to medium sized operations, but there are alternatives available as well.

Now that social media has been established as significant marketing medium,  software developers have stepped in to help out those senior executives and business owners who don’t have the time to be tweeting. Apps like Hootsuite can schedule and automate the process, so you can spend an hour or two on Friday afternoon to bank a week’s worth of tweets and updates. Be prepared to do this regularly and once a week at least.

The added advantage
On Twitter, other users will be able to find your account through your mutual followers. This means that following your competitors can be very beneficial to your business. You may get more followers by following some celebrity, but the chances of them interested in your product or services is very bleak. If your focus is more local then consider following prominent local politicians and charitable organizations, and showing your support for them can be a good PR engine as well.

Finally, have a plan
Tragically, all of this advice has its downside, and is subject to change rapidly. The main caveat of social networking is the social aspect. People can be unpredictable, and your actions may have dire consequences even if you make every attempt to be neutral and politically correct. This is why it is important above everything else to have a plan in place before diving into the social media shark tank.

Are you interested in achieving sales growth with existing resources? Businesses are increasingly turning into sales optimization and lead management which frees up time for sales representatives to focus on high yield activities like engaging qualified prospects and closing sales.  Download this ActiveConversion whitepaper which shows you how lead management can help you achieve best-in-class sales performance.

Industry surveys indicate that only 10 to 25 percent of all leads are sales-ready, meaning prospects are interested and ready to buy.  A similar percentage of leads are not qualified at all. This means 50 to 80 percent of all leads generated can result in wasted effort if handled inappropriately.

By implementing a lead management system, the quality of leads will increase while the quantity of leads will decrease. Marketing will see a higher percentage of leads being followed up and sales will see a gratifying increase in the quality of leads presented to them. Companies that have implemented these tools have experienced a 30% or higher lead to sales conversion rate.

A significant advantage introduced with marketing automation systems is the capability to alert the appropriate sales representative at the moment any lead becomes sales-ready. This further reduces the load on the sales force and increases their effectiveness.

CEO and Co-founder of ActiveConversion Fred Yee was interviewed by host Will Crist on SLMA Radio Talk Show on September 9, 2010. The SLMA radio show is an interview with industry leaders and presents their opinions about current industry trends. These industry leaders share their management philosophy and their approach on topics such as sales lead management, lead generation and marketing automation. 

Find out why:

1. Salesforce.com has become the preferred CRM now

2. Hiring is picking up in select companies

3. You should use a CRM

4. A product like ActiveConversion is becoming indispensable to sales and marketing

5. Sales lead management is important to all B2B companies.

Listen to Fred’s insightful thoughts on the future of marketing automation and sales lead management for SMBs.

Right click and save to download the full episode.

SLMA Radio is a 50 minute internet radio show produced four times each month. It broadcasts live at 5 PM PST, in the United States from OC Talk Radio. The host is talk-show commentator Will Crist where he interviews industry leaders and they present their opinions about current industry trends. For more information, visit SLMA Radio . For more information on ActiveConversion, please visit ActiveConversion.com and follow us on Twitter & Facebook.

I recently had the pleasure of  attending the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference, which is a leading search & social marketing event, on Aug 18  in San Francisco.  It was great to hear from the industry’s best!  Personally, I checked out conference talks about Local Search, Mobile Marketing, Competitive Research, Twitternation & Automation, and B2B Lead Generation Management/CRM Integration.  I also had the opportunity to go down the expo floor and checked out vendors pushing the latest and the greatest they had to offer.  I can’t possibly cover everything from SES, but I wanted to boil it down and bring you my personal highlights.

Autonomous Twitter personas maybe the evil future

Jeff Pulver, Tracy Falke and Paul Madden provided a wonderfully heated panel on Twitternation & Automation.  Jeff highlighted that Twitter has empowered individuals to connect in ways that has incredible reach, impact, both globally and individually.  His background and stories were inspiring.  On automation, it was clear to many within the audience that automation and management systems were necessary to cost effectively leverage channels like Twitter. Tracy did a fantastic job on explaining this well, and brought attention to tools like SocialOomph to help in those efforts.  B2B Marketers in particular should take note of twitter and social media automation tools to conserve their precious time spent in social media efforts.

Finally, Paul showcased how a whole ecosystem of almost fully autonomous Twitter personas can be established and leveraged to create ongoing massive influence on Twitter.  It was both eye opening and interesting to learn the impact that such automation could have with social media if just a dozen companies implemented automated ecosystems of thousands of Twitter personas.  The impact it can goes beyond the Twittersphere but also how it can be manipulated to impact real time results on search engines is something Twitter and Google will likely have to address in their algorithms and policies.

The Mobile Frontier is here

Sandeep Aggarwal, Cindy Krum and Michael Martin presented a panel on mobile marketing.  Sandeep’s presentation made clear that mobile isn’t just an emerging market but a fundamental channel for online interaction.  B2B business websites receive significant mobile exposure.  Individuals in B2B are among the largest adapters of smartphones.  Smartphones are frequently the primary method of accessing online content for individuals in B2B industries.

Mobile browsers doesn’t just impact the way visitors interact with media and content, it also impacts search engine optimization. Cindy commented that mobile SERPs (search engine result pages) are already showing differences from non-mobile SERPs.  Inevitably search engines will be moving towards tailoring algorithms for mobile devices for mobile optimized sites.  It’s important to start setting up SEO strategies to be prepared for that now.

It’s not all about the ‘i’ devices either; Michael was great to point out that Android is a growing player and is faster in growing market than the iPhone.  This is particularly important for businesses who are considering jumping onto the ‘Apps’ craze, and selecting which device platform to develop for.  Regarding ‘Apps’, it was acknowledged that iOS is the big gorilla right now.

‘Pay per’ Advertising Expo

Online advertising management and automation systems seemed to be the big thing on the expo floor.  Every other booth was for automated online advertising management which offered one stop shop for managing PPM campaigns on AdWords, MSN, Yahoo, Facebook, etc.  Pricing for many of these systems are based on charging a percentage above each CPC run through their system, Google’s DoubleClick (whom Google acquired in 2007) is a solution that offers this pricing model.  A similar breed of products was a competitive analysis system that allows users to dig into competitors online marketing efforts to see what/how they are doing in different channels.  Mark Munroe, a panelist on the Competitive Research panel, recommended AdGooroo SEM Insight and Spy Fu as good candidates for doing competitive analysis for paid advertising (e.g. Adwords).

The other big thing on the expo floor was the ad networks.  I want to mention them because many of them were offering a cost per acquisition (CPA) model of pricing.  Although these networks aren’t going to replace your AdWords, the CPA model makes them a fairly low risk channel to add into a marketing mix, particularly if you are in e-commerce.

The Keynote

BJ Fogg’s keynote was about how technology allows us to create or change behavior. BJ was fantastic in illustrating the mechanics of how it needs to operate, and where it fails.  It’s worth checking out to help frame your mentality towards online marketing as it’s fundamentally association with BJ’s topic.  Adam Singer did a more in-depth review of the keynote for TopRankBlog: http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/08/persuasive-technology-ses-keynote/

CEO and Co-founder of ActiveConversion Fred Yee will be on SLMA Radio Talk Show with host Will Crist for a live 25 minute interview sharing his management philosophy and discussing topics on sales lead management that is scheduled for September 9, 2010.

The SLMA radio show is an interview with industry leaders and presents their opinions about current industry trends.  The industry leaders share their management philosophy and their approach on topics such as sales lead management, lead generation and marketing automation.

You can listen to the entire broadcast live at 5 PM PST Time on http://www.octalkradio.net/ on SLMA Radio.

Previous guests have been  B2B experts such as Mac MacIntosh and Marketo CEO, Phil Fernandez. Future guests include author Jill Konrath (Selling to Big Companies), and Carlos Hidalgo, CEO of the Annunitas Group.

SLMA Radio is a 50 minute internet radio show produced four times each month.  It broadcasts live at 5 PM PST, in the United States from OC Talk Radio. The host is talk-show commentator Will Crist.  The second host is James Obermayer, CEO of the Sales Lead Management Association.

For more information on ActiveConversion, please visit http://www.activeconversion.com and follow us on Twitter twitter.com/ActiveConv & Facebook www.facebook.com/pages/ActiveConversion/37964683575