B2B Marketing Blog

Does your company want to get its feet wet in the social media world, or is trying to and spinning its wheels?  If so, what can be done to improve the situation?

First, re-analyze why you have a company blog in the first place:

1. We have a blog because competitors do and we don’t want to seem out of the loop.
2. We have a blog due to the fact we wanted a way to promote our brands and services.
3. We have a blog for the simple reason our owner likes to talk a lot and this was one way for him/her to spout off.

So, what would you say is the correct answer to the three options above? If you said the last one, maybe your company needs more assistance than some realize.

While choice number one may be part of the reasoning for your blog, number two should be the obvious choice. Quite simply, company blogs are great tools to not only promote your goods and services, but stay in the social media loop.

With that being said, don’t just write to write.

• Your company’s blog needs to have worthwhile content on it so people will read it in the first place.

• Secondly, it requires regular updating so that readers will come back to it and search engines are more likely to pick it up. If you update it once in a blue moon, not only will readers be gone but the search engines will pick up more worthwhile entries.

• Another reason that readers will come and go from a company blog is if they are leaving valid, appropriate comments and you are not responding. Would you follow someone if you left them several comments and they ignored you? Companies need to take the bad feedback from consumers with the good, so respond accordingly, but do respond.

Companies need to determine if the blog materials they’re covering are appropriate for their readers in the first place. Relevant information draws people to blogs, so know what you want to write about ahead of time and be concise.

Are you placing relevant internal and external links and keywords in your company’s blog?

While SEO writing may not be for everyone, it is not rocket science either. If your company covers the auto insurance industry, your blog better be insurance related in order to drive more worthwhile traffic to it.

The most important item brings us full circle to the first point….why are we blogging in the first place?

Some companies decide its best to hire full-time staff to write, edit and oversee blogs. It allows for the boss/bosses to delegate one more item to professionals who can get the company’s message across.

Others, meantime, decide to do it on their own and give it more of a personal feel from the man or woman at the top.

Both ways can have their advantages and disadvantages, so decide what is best for your company. If you try one approach and it is not working for a period of time try another until you find the right solution.

A company blog can be a very useful tool to drive business your way; determine how blogging can best serve your business and get writing.

Dave Thomas is an expert writer on items like a document management systems and is based in San Diego, California.  He writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs at Resource Nation.

Blogging is considered to be one of the most effective methods of pull marketing. Prospective buyers are drawn towards the valuable content offered in the blog.

Another channel that can be used for sharing valuable content to increase your inbound marketing reach is to publish and engage in social media.  Sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn have proven to be great tools for B2B companies, and Facebook is not far behind.

Twitter, a micro-blogging community, provides a portal to learn the behaviours and habits of the end consumer.  For B2B companies, this is a fantastic tool to understand their customer’s customer.

LinkedIn is a social media portal designed for businesses and business-people to connect with each other and share knowledge, ideas, and opportunities.  This has become the go-to tool for finding experts, employment opportunities, and potential employees.

ActiveConversion recently conducted a webinar on SEO, Content, and Social media. This webinar examined inbound marketing and the value of content in generating thought leadership and credibility for your company, products, and services.

Martha Boulianne also recently published this blog on FoundPages, that discusses the value of blogging and outlines eight ways to improve a corporate blog.

Here are the main points suggested by Martha on improving your corporate blog:

1. Spread the word.
2. Add quality content.
3. Blog early, blog often.
4. Link to your own old posts.
5. Add links and images to your blog posts.
6. Write comments on related blogs.
7. Write title tags for both your readers and Google.
8. Cover topics that need attention.

Read the rest of the blog here…

Related articles

• Corporate Blogging Tip: Use Your “More” Tag (socialtimes.com)
• Guilt-Free Business Blogging – 7 Ways A Blog Can Grow Your Business (blogherald.com)
• Corporate Blogging: You’re Doing It Wrong (blogs.sitepoint.com)
• Whiteboard Friday – Corporate Blogging Tips (seomoz.org)

SEO, Content, Social Media

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media and content are collectively the three most important components of inbound marketing. For this webinar, we’re calling them “The Three Musketeers of Inbound Marketing”. Between them, they are capable of winning you the best qualified leads in this modern marketing battle of quality lead generation from various online medium.

View this live Webinar which took place on Tuesday, April 19, 2011 at 12:00PM MDT.

Inbound marketing “pulls” potential buyers towards your business and your products. In today’s shifting marketing paradigm, where your potential buyers research and dissect all the available options before they contact you, there is also a need for a strong inbound marketing capability. After all, you should be among the few that your potential buyers read and investigate about. Inbound marketing is executed with strategies such as: search engine optimization (SEO), relevant and compelling content, and social media.

In this webinar, Jim, our inbound marketing specialist will walk you through some tested and proven inbound marketing strategies that will enable you to know:

• How SEO can help you get found on the internet?
• How social media, marketing content and blogging can contribute towards a more informed inbound lead generation strategy?
• How marketing automation generates leads from various sources, and how it can help you make intelligent decisions?

Many small to medium sized oganizations are taking the leap to starting up a company blog. Blogs often get neglected until there is a major press release or news event, which can be very infrequent for SMBs in products and services. It is common to see a company blog that hasn’t been updated in months, or over a year. It can be a struggle to come up with ideas to blog about therefore, I wanted to offer help ideas that will have you blogging on a regular basis.

My company is a services company, what can I blog about?

Projects in the works, recently completed projects
If you offer development services, post about projects that have been recently completed. For instance,  if you are a realtor, post about recently sold properties. If your organization works with other larger organizations, post about that. These kinds of posts will help re-enforce confidence in prospects and highlight services that your existing clients may not know you do. It’ll also keep you top of mind of your interested prospects and clients.

Process Highlights
Highlighting processes in the way you deliver your services to your clients can be the differentiator between your company and your competitors. It’s important to pitch your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) and it can be better received if it’s passively served via your blog.

My company is a product company, what else can I blog about?

Your products are your bread and butter and when possible they should also be the focus of your blog.

New Products or Vendor/Suppliers
It’s not uncommon for companies to bring launch products and fail to appropriately announce it. Use your blog as a channel to highlight when your company has something new to offer and the problem it solves.

Featured Product
Sometimes an organization has many products. With so many choices, prospective customers may find it hard to find the right product. Other times, product information pages can be too limited for customers to get the information they want. Highlighting products, particularly ones that are of high popularity can help your company around those issues. It’s particularly effective if images or videos are available with these postings.

Product Promotions or Discounts
Everyone likes a sale, particularly if you sell consumer products – a promotion/discount announcement can be picked up by one of the many popular consumer deals sites online.

Other Common Topics

• Success Stories
• Commentary on industry events or commentary from other industry leaders
  Posts that reference well known individuals are particularly effective in driving traffic from searchers online. Both commentary and client success stories help establish credibility for your company, which helps to differentiate your company and reinforce confidence in prospects.

I’m Still Stuck

Sometimes you just don’t have anything to talk about.  At those times, you have to defer to the backup plan.

• Best posts of July, September, 2009, etc
• Links to other industry blogs…
  If you choose to blog about another blog or resource, you should notify the person you are promoting and many bloggers will make a post about it, hopefully crediting your company or blog. This will help build up your blog’s network and credibility.

The Most Common Mistake

The most common mistake for company blogs is to only post company news or press releases. Although those types of posts can be a part of your company’s blog, they should be the minority of the posts. If you make this common mistake, the only people who will read it will be your company’s staff or your competitors.

Business blogging is regarded as the domain of experts, experts willing to spend lots of time each day telling the world about an industry or a sector.  We’ll call this “hard blogging”.  The benefits of hard blogging are many, but the time commitment of hard blogging is usually a huge deterrent so most SMBs balk at it because they feel that a) they don’t have the time to think up analysis or insight that anyone would read, and b) there’s nothing to blog about my business that my customers would be interested in reading (e.g. after I buy a granite countertop for my kitchen, I’m probably not interested in following the granite countertop industry).

An alternate form of blogging that brings it’s own basket of  benefits is what I’ll call “soft blogging”; not blogging analysis but rather easier, once a week, announcement-like content.  Here are five examples:

1. Customer testimonials; getting testimonials from happy customers is an obvious best practice, and when you do, a blog is the perfect venue for maximizing the return on that testimonial.  Include a small description of the service or product rendered to get the testimonial.
2. Portfolio of projects; this is for companies with fewer clients but bigger projects – this is a case study in effect.  Nothing makes you real like a list of real projects you’ve completed, far more so than all the “motherhood” statements on your website.
3. News and Press releases; all companies should put out press releases, submitted to an online wire service like PR web, once a quarter. They are like little golden micro-sites devoted to your company that deliver visitors for years.  Examples of what to put in them include a new management hire, a major client landed or project completed, a new service you now offer, or a new product line you’ve begun carrying (here’s a bigger list).  Publish to your blog as well.
4. Job postings; hiring people says your company is growing and the job description is a wonderful grab bag of what your company does well.  Blogging a job posting is one of the only ways a small business can attract attention to a job posting on its own without relying on a 3rd party website.  Once you hire someone, change the post to a hire announcement and re-publish.
5. Marketing and Sales collateral; you have brochures, and you have digital versions of them. Do a paragraph summary of what they contain and post them online.  Instead of emailing a PDF to a prospect, your sales person can now email them a link to where it resides on your web page, and if they do come to investigate it, they may partake more of your messaging on your website/blog.

A key element of this strategy is that the blog must be sub-domained to your website; the search engines will then see it as part of your website.  This is a bit technical, but here’s a company that will do it for you.  This approach is search engine ‘gold’.  You are adding new content to your website on an ongoing basis (I’d suggest once a week) and you are educating search engines (i.e. Google) about what you do.

In some ways for many companies “soft blogging” is more beneficial than “hard blogging”. Testimonials and /or a portfolio of projects is often a more powerful aid in getting new business than stating your opinion on topics many of your prospects will likely not have the time or inclination to read.  Getting new business is the acid test after all; will this activity bring you more business?  The answer is yes.  This approach will bring more visitors to your website, and you will convince more of them you are a real company that has happy customers.  More visitors will identify themselves and ask questions and request quotes.  Go “soft blogging”!

The days when all you needed for online marketing was a nice website have long passed.  In order to be effectively represented online, you’ll need effective campaigns on several critical platforms.  The platforms vary depending on the type of business you are in, but for those of you still finding your footing; here is a short checklist of platforms you should consider.

Stable Content

• Website: Since its 2010, you should have professional website.  If you don’t have one, get on it.
• Bonus Points Wikipedia Entry: Businesses haven’t fully embraced Wikipedia but it is the authority for information reference.  Having a Wikipedia entry will become increasingly important for online credibility and exposure.

Regularly Updated Content

• Blog: A critical platform for establishing credibility with the online community and search engines.  If your organization doesn’t have a blog, you are missing out on establishing yourself as an online authority in your industry.
• Bonus Points Periodical Press Releases: Press Releases still have their place online, particularly when pushed out with a service like PRWeb.com.  It can do more than just a blog posting or website update as it pushes to many channels, allowing for more exposure and credibility.

Social Networking

• Twitter/Facebook Fan Page: Twitter and Facebook are the kings of social networking and an increasingly important platform to promote dialog between companies and the online community.
• Bonus Points LinkedIn/Foursquare: LinkedIn and Foursquare aren’t for everyone, but depending on the kind of business you do, these maybe valuable platforms to reach potential customers.

Video Media

• YouTube: YouTube continues to be a predominately an entertainment focused community, but its reach is undeniable.  If you have how-to videos, or a business presentation, they are good candidates for YouTube.
• Bonus Points Webinar: Webinars are a great way to interact with customers and the community.  Webinars add great value for any customer base.

Search Engine Marketing

• Google AdWords: This isn’t a must but for those of you who are just starting out, or struggling in competitive markets, pay-per-click campaigns with Google can get you that exposure when you need it.
• Bonus Points Pay-per-click on Facebook/LinkedIn/Yahoo/Bing: Although Google is the most recognized player; pretty much every major platform (Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Bing, etc) has a similar version of the pay-per-click program.  They may present a less competitive and more targeted environment to push marketing efforts.

Depending on your business and goals, the platforms mentioned may not be critical.  Also keep in mind that just because you are represented on these platforms doesn’t necessarily mean you are being represented well on each platform.  However, how to assess your effectiveness on the various online platforms is the topic for another post.

Do you have other platforms that are critical to your business’s online marketing strategy that you feel should be on this list?  Please share it with us in the comments.

Social media is becoming a popular avenue for businesses by creating a voice for their business and attracting prospective leads by distributing details, free offers and news about their product & services. For a long time, social media was looked upon as a personal communication channel, where you could provide your opinion about personal things. Since that time Social Media has greatly evolved into a channel for businesses that want to leverage social networks to share their respective experiences and how others can benefit from their offering.

Many have seen Social Media as a distribution channel, a value add asset for potential leads, and a means to offer promotions that will in turn entice people to follow them and be their customer.

Join Yves Matson, as he shares emerging best practices that effectively integrate Social Media into online marketing.

Webinar Title: How to use Social Media in B2B Marketing

To access the webinar recording, click on the link below:
http://www.foundpages.com/social-media-webinar.html

Topics included:

* Utilizing newsletters, blogging, case study publishing, and webinars for social media marketing
* Using Social Media as a distribution channel for blog, newsletter, or website content
* Case Study: How ActiveConversion uses Social Media Marketing for B2B marketing and how they measure ROI using marketing automation.

The principal sponsors of this blog, Active Conversion, are offering an limited time 60 day free trial if you sign up as a result of reading this post, so here’s a quick look at what to expect:

After you’ve taken a few minutes to activate your trial account and install the Active Conversion code, you’ll begin seeing results immediately and within days patterns will begin to emerge.  To start with, visitors to your site will be identified by company name.  Some of these visitors may surprise you and as a B2B marketer or sales professional you’ll gain valuable information about which companies are interested in you.

After a while some visitors will start to jump out at you, repeatedly returning to your website to visit more and more pages.  Intuitively you may have pegged them as higher value and more qualified but now you have quantified data to back that hunch up.

For the trial, most marketers or sales professionals simply used the default lead scoring.  By looking at the online behavior of your visitors you’ll begin to correlate that to the lead score that each visitor accumulates.  Eventually you’ll be able to develop your own lead scoring criteria based on the behavior of visitors to your own site but for now you can see that higher lead scores mean higher quality leads.

If your site has pages with form fills using the same default conventions as Active Conversion, your visitors that have previously been identified by company now become people with names, email addresses and/or phone numbers.  In other words, leads.

You’ll also want to take an email nurture campaign for a spin during your trial.  Load up some content into a nurture campaign, pick say 3 emails over six weeks, and anytime any of the respondents clicks through on a link, they are identified as though they had form filled on your website.

Eventually when these leads are presented to your sales team the lead information will include a summary of their activity.  This will give your reps some background for that all-important first call.

This has been a quick look but you can see that even on the trial, things happens automatically, like it’s on cruise control.  We haven’t even talked about, lead nurturing, lead management, email marketing campaigns to your existing in-house lists, or social media ROI tracking.

Feel free to pass this offer along to your network, as long as you or they use this sign up page they’ll have access to a 60 day trial.

There’s mounting evidence that the popularity of Twitter has hackers and phishers shifting focus to Twitter accounts.

According to researchers at Kaspersky Lab, cybercriminals are trying to sell hacked Twitter user names and passwords on-line for hundreds of dollars.

While this is an outgrowth of existing security problems…

[data-stealing malware is] popular because criminals are starting to realize that they can do better than simply swiping credit card numbers. Bestuzhev has seen Gmail accounts for sale on Russian hacker forums, (asking price 2,500 rubles, or $82) RapidShare accounts going for $5 per month, as well as Skype, instant messaging and Facebook credentials being offered.

…Twitter is being singled out because of the premium hackers and phishers can charge for them:

…one Twitter account, with just over 320 followers, was offered at $1,000 in an underground hacker forum. The user’s name was a simple three letter combination that Bestuzhev thought might make it more valuable to criminals.

The answer is to use the same vigilance with Twitter as you currently use with email. Evaluate the link you are about to click on (URL expander plugins for Internet Explorer and Firefox that will show you the extended URLs without you having to click on them), use a strong and unique password, always check that you are at twitter.com before logging in, and select third party apps with care.  Learn more here.

ActiveConversion recently released another in their popular series of “eHow To” guides.  This one deals with using Marketing Automation to leverage B2B Blogging.  From the summary:

Lead nurturing is the process of communicating with prospects who are not yet ready to buy. B2B Blogging enables marketers to contact such prospects on an ongoing basis.

Only 10 to 25 percent of all leads are sales-ready. A similar percentage of leads are not qualified at all. This means 50 to 80 percent of all leads generated are potentially wasted if no appropriate action is taken.

With B2B Blogging marketers can realize significant benefits. Leads that are not sales-ready are not lost and significant online lead generation effort is not wasted. Automation of lead nurturing increases the ROI of all online marketing activities.

To download this whitepaper on implementing a blog for your business, click on the image!