B2B’s social media superstars | {grow} Yesterday I covered the five worst B2B social media screw-ups, so now let’s look at the BEST. Success stories in this space are few and far between. A recent report showed just 14% of the largest industrial companies have a social media strategy, let alone a good one. There are many good reasons for the slow adoption of SM at the industrials, including the perilous economy and a customer base that could care less about your freakin’ tweets if their railcar of chemicals is an hour late. A few months ago I spent time assessing the state of SM at B2B companies and overall, my research showed that B2B companies don’t seem to get the notion of community and are trying to fit traditional marketing stereotypes into the new media. Number 5: Ingram Micro — Ingram Micro is the world’s largest technology distributor to the IT industry. Number 2: General Electric — I’ve found that when a company is well-managed, it tends to do EVERYTHING well.
So, what companies have I missed? Will Pull Marketing Generate Leads? | B6 Group. If you know your prospects and have their contact details in your CRM system or database, well… pull marketing may not be the most effective method to use for increasing sales leads this month. That said, it could be a viable way for converting prospects into Customers using our Triangle of Trust process if you have some very compelling content to give away to your prospects as teasers. Folks, if you need new business from potential Customers that are currently unknown to you… pull marketing can be a highly effective weapon in your arsenal. Many people have asked us to present a list of best practices when they need more leads for their business so we collected a few of the best tips and posted them here for your review – hope it helps to answer some of your questions. If you’d like more concrete information or a customized process map, just get in touch with our sales team by filling out this form.
Here are a few action steps to get you started. Establish your marketing objectives: Two Lead Generation Strategies That Work : Inbound Marketing Strategies. A Day Made of Glass... Made possible by Corning. 15 Ways to Get 'Liked' on Facebook. Once a business has established a Facebook Page, a key challenge is to grow its fan base. This is accomplished, in part, through the use of the “Like” button. By clicking the Like button, a person expresses affinity for the brand or its products. It is the Facebook equivalent of an email opt-in. Here are 15 ways to encourage people to Like your Facebook Page. 1. Incorporate the Like Button on the Company Website Facebook has nine different social plug-ins, which can be added to your business website to create a more personalized, social experience for visitors. Facebook Like button code example.
Assuming the Like button is associated with your Facebook Page, when a person clicks it he or she immediately becomes a fan without ever leaving the website. 2. Though you don’t see them on every site, it has become commonplace to find links to social networks on business websites where the company has a presence. Add a Facebook icon to your website linking to your fan Page. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Social Media For B2B Marketing – How To Get Started | B2C Marketing Insider.
How to Optimize Your B2B Marketing and Sales with Online Video. How to Choose the Right Content Type for Social Media Success. What's driving the content marketing evolution? In the old B2B model, buyers accessed, evaluated, and understood the marketplace solely through a select group of middlemen -- namely trade publications, analysts, and specialized experts. As a result, the road to success for the marketer was clear -- be on the top right quadrant of the next analyst report or on the front page of the next trade magazine.
Static content and strong relationships with these middlemen best described how to succeed in content marketing. Along came the internet, and with it, a new way of creating and publishing online information for prospects. Instead of waiting for analyst input and trade publications, buyers now use the Internet in their search for information. However, don't be fooled: The middleman remains a necessary player in the B2B world. Who is this new middleman and what does that mean for the B2B marketer? Unfortunately, creating custom content can prove both expensive and time consuming. So, what is a content curator? Content Now Vital to B2B Marketing - Lisa Arthur - The Marketing Revolution. Content Marketing with a B2B Podcast.
Is B2B on Board with Social? - eMarketer. 5 Ways for B2B Companies to Engage on Facebook. Recently, I looked at 5 Ways for B2B Companies to Engage on Twitter. If the micro-blogging tool is often cited as a social media marketer’s golden child, Facebook may just as often be considered the red-headed stepchild. Jeff’s post Facebook is Doing it Wrong for B2B Companies touches on many of the ways Facebook is ignoring marketers’ needs, in addition to its shaky privacy policies and recently ill-received Places launch. However, Facebook has more than 500 million reasons for B2B companies to create and foster an interactive, informative community for employees, partners, customers, retailers and distributors.
Here’s a starter kit for B2B companies to better engage on Facebook: 1. The design principle “Keep it simple, stupid” also applies to content you’re already spending time to create. 2. Sometimes, all you have to do is ask. On the lighter side, use questions as a conversation starter. If you’re asking your Facebook followers for feedback, remember it’s a two-way street. 3. 4. 5. 5 Ways for B2B Companies to Engage on Twitter. Just as B2B sales relationships aren’t built over night, sustained B2B Twitter relationships – often the basis for industry insight, lead generation and media coverage – require a commitment to engagement. When considering and crafting Twitter contributor, monitoring and legality strategies to support B2B sales efforts, it’s also important to think about how your company can leverage two-way communication.
Here are five ways to approach B2B Twitter engagement: 1. Original content While it may seem like a no-brainer, it’s easy to get so caught up in sharing other Twitter users’ original content – such as industry news articles or upcoming conferences – that business accounts can lose any sense of value for existing or new followers. If nothing else, take Twitter at its micro-blogging face value: With a blog editorial calendar-like mentality, draft 140-character tips, observations and FAQs that act as mini, distilled blog posts. 2. 3.
The beauty of Twitter is its mobility. 4. 5. Social Media for B2B: 3 “Can’t Ignore” Case Studies — It's All About Revenue. Social media playbooks and templates are valuable, but sometimes the best way to learn is by seeing what others have done, then adapting it to fit your business’ needs. Following are three case studies that show how social media, employed strategically, can have a dramatic impact on a B2B company’s reputation and revenue. From lead generation to channel marketing to corporate reputation, following are three hand-picked case studies that noone in B2B marketing can ignore: 1. Kinaxis: Learn how this supply chain management SaaS company tripled web traffic and leads by creating a community and syndicating helpful content across third-party networks. Spokesperson Kirsten Watson shares a compelling insight when she says social media is a natural extension to Kinaxis’ successful SEO efforts.
(Thanks to Jeffrey L. Cohen of SocialMediaB2B for the great content.) 2. 3. I hope these case studies have been useful. 12 Ways to Leverage Your LinkedIn Profile for a B2B Company. LinkedIn is considered by many to be the professional social network, but since it is based around people and their individual profiles, many don’t realize the benefit their B2B company can get with a well-crafted, active personal profile.
Users can develop and strengthen business relationships, receive industry information, demonstrate thought leadership and improve search results for their company website and blogs. The following points below can help you transform your profile into one that supports your company’s online marketing efforts. 1. Descriptive Headline The default for this field is your current position at your current company. While many change this to a more general statement about themselves, keeping your company name in this statement clearly identifies you as a part of the company. Since many people use LinkedIn as a job search site, but claiming your company as part of your identity, you demonstrate your commitment to company to outsiders. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
B2B social media spend to increase to $4.8 billion by 2014 | Social media agency London | FreshNetworks blog. According to a recent report by emarketer, business-to-business (B2B) spending on social media is set to increase dramatically over the next few years. Outsell, a company who provides business intelligence for publishers and information providers, estimates that B2B marketing on social networks will grow by 43.3% in 2010. Perhaps even more interesting is Forrester Research’s prediction that B2B firms will spend $4.8 billion on social media marketing by 2014 – an increase of $2.3 billion in comparison to 2009 spend.
Emarketer’s Evelyn Jung, author of a new report called “B2B Social Media Marketing Heats Up”, believes that B2B marketers will realise they can use social media to generate quality leads and to position themselves as thought leaders in their industries. Currently B2B marketers tend to spend their money on customer communities, podcasts and blogs. 10 Essential Social Media Tools for B2B Marketers. This series is supported by the MarketingProfs B2B Forum, where you'll learn the ins-and-outs of social media as part of your overall B2B marketing mix. Register today! Like anything else, social media marketing is easier, more efficient and more effective if the marketer has the right set of tools. While hundreds (if not thousands) of tools and services exist for social media marketing, many are still primarily aimed at either consumers or B2C marketers.
Fear not B2B marketers — there are still plenty of great tools out there than can best address the unique needs of the B2B space. We've raided our own toolkits to come up with some of the best tools and services for B2B marketers that want to get the most out of social media. 1. The mac daddy of web-based CRM products hasn't been afraid to embrace social media. One of the best applications for B2B marketers who use Salesforce.com is Salesforce for Twitter. 2. 3. 4. [Disclosure: Syncapse is a Mashable sponsor] 5. 6. 7. 8. truPULSE 9. 10.
The Chocolate and Peanut Butter of B2B Social Media and Search. There has been lots of discussion around B2B social media as a means to build brand awareness. This awareness translates into leads, or sales, by keeping the company’s brand in your mind so that when you make purchase recommendations or decisions, the company comes to mind. This level of brand awareness is not built overnight. It takes time and money, and traditionally included expensive advertising, which is not always available for B2B companies. Here’s how the social web automates that process of building top of mind awareness. What does Google want to do? It wants to return the most relevant search results to every person. While previous Google search algorithms were based on things like the popularity of a page, as determined by its page rank, or the number incoming links a page had, Google’s more recent determination of relevance takes a person’s web surfing history much more into account. What is the point of creating blog content and distributing it out across the social web?
13 Essential Social Media Lessons for B2B Marketers from the Masters. This series is supported by the MarketingProfs B2B Forum, where you'll learn the ins-and-outs of social media as part of your overall B2B marketing mix. Register today! Social media marketing might feel simple for the B2C crowd, but with B2B, it's an entirely different beast. Businesses are entities that are not entirely social — and certainly don't do the immediate impulse buy like the typical consumer. Nevertheless, B2B marketing is absolutely possible on social media, but certain rules should be followed before proceeding along that route. We asked several "masters" about their number one B2B social media tip and included them below. 1. "B2B is more P2P - people to people. 2. "Content is my best B2B social media lesson. 3.
"My best B2B social media lesson was … learning to quickly get clear on what I wanted to accomplish with social media, so that I didn’t spin my wheels. In the B2B world especially, it's crucial to step back and look at your business and who your target customer is. Study: Most Effective B2B Social Media Tactics are IT ‘Lite’ Guest post by Ben Hanna, VP of Marketing for Business.com, the Web’s leading portal for business owners. According to a new study involving more than 1,700 small business leaders, companies marketing to small businesses would be well advised to focus on social media tactics requiring little IT investment, such as webinars, podcasts and establishing a presence on top social networking sites, before pursuing more IT resource intensive initiatives such as creating a company-managed online community.
The study, conducted by Business.com, finds that that four of the top five most effective social media tactics for engaging small business decision makers do not require significant IT investment or involvement. The exception – company blogs – should be backed by both a strategic content strategy and the resources necessary to create this content on an ongoing basis before it allocating IT resources to blog creation or management. Photo credit: p_kirn. 7 Online Video Tips Every B2B Marketer Should Know. Making and distributing good B2B video content takes time. It isn’t a quick process to arrange a video shoot, edit video and then upload it to the social web. This work though can come with a substantial pay-off if as a B2B company you understand how to do the little things to maximize the effectiveness of online video.
When it comes to online video several issues exist. Search engines don’t index the content of video well. People can’t always watch video at work because of firewall issues and out of date software. . – This first tip is so simple but so many businesses don’t do it. . – This is a tactic that may add a little more time to getting your video published, but is completely worth it.
. – People have short attention spans when it comes to the web. . – More than 90 percent of the videos watched online are watched on YouTube. . – Uploading online video, especially if it is high quality or HD, takes a significant amount of time. Do you have other B2B video tips? Chart: How influential are podcasts in the... - B2B Specialist. 11 Documents To Get Your Business Started In B2B Social Media. When we think of the social web and media sharing, we often think of sharing sites like YouTube and Flickr. However, a diverse group of sites have formed around almost all media types to help people share and store what they have created online. Two of my favorite services that often fly under the radar are Scribd and Docstoc. In the way that YouTube helps people share videos, these two services help people and businesses share documents. If you are about to draft a new type of document both of these services can be very helpful to show examples of how other individuals and organizations have done it.
For today’s post, I have pulled a wide variety of documents that could be helpful to B2B companies getting started with social media. See the list below for 11 documents that may help you with your own documents and provide information you need for executive presentations. 1. 3. 4. 5. 6. 8. 9. 5 Social Media Marketing Best Practices for B2B 5 Social Media Marketing Best Practices for B2B – Twitter Techniques for B2B | Word Sell, Inc. What Social Media Can and Can't Do for You - ClickZ.