8 key issues to review to make sure your blog supports company goals
This is the second in a series of blog posts aimed at helping business bloggers. The first post explored getting started and avoiding writer's block, sometimes an issue at this time of year. In this post, René Power examines the key elements of a successful business blog.
If you're running a business targeting other businesses in 2012, it is likely you have either read about or been advised to introduce a blog to your website. The benefits of business blogging are much chronicled - Dave and Chris both covered it from a commercial and SEO viewpoint.
But with a bewildering choice of over 250 million websites and 130 million blogs (with five million new ones coming online every year), your customers don't have a lot of time or attention. How does a corporate blog attract and retain readers? (Statistics…
Six post ideas which work for any business blog
Following on from the recent Smart Insights post on 30 ideas to get more visitors to your blog, I thought I'd follow-up with some more specific ideas for B2B blogs. I believe blogs are the foundation of any respectable BB content marketing strategy and the place where issues can be explored, trends discussed, communities created and prospects identified. So in the first in a series of posts on business blogging, I'll discuss how to avoid a common challenge - what to write about!
A company blog can, over time, significantly increase a website’s presence in search engine results and be a valuable source of inbound inquiries for a business. It is crucial that to be successful, your business has to tap into the needs of your target audience, and provides useful, usable and relevant content.
For me, the trick to effective business blog…
[caption id="attachment_7731" align="alignright" width="360" caption="Slideshare: a part of the hub-and-spoke approach"][/caption]
I think many readers will be familiar with Slideshare, a business-to-business (mostly) presentation sharing website which enables organisations to upload their PowerPoint presentations (or Mac Keynote) and Word documents and share them with the world. It’s an excellent way to showcase your thought leadership ideas as part of a content marketing strategy.
As an example, you may have seen Dave Chaffey's Slideshare, its power is shown because some presentations like this one on trends for 2012 will reach several times more people through Slideshare's platform than the embeds on Smart Insights.
This happens because Slideshare facilitates sharing within it's platform and through the social networks.
Elqoua and Hubspot are both great examples of leveraging Slideshare to its best potential, they leverage the paid service to turn Slideshare into a well branded…
Six examples of how to use Facebook company pages for B2B marketing
In my previous post on B2B Facebook page marketing, I outlined the emerging and evolving case for adding Facebook to your B2B marketing arsenal and offered some advice on the type of strategies you might adopt. Here, I'll run through a number of current Facebook sites which show how B2B companies might use the platform to promote their business.
Solid B2B success stories in social media remain few and far between - especially when it comes to Facebook. So, by way of follow up, I wanted to showcase some B2B examples. Despite all the talk of Facebook becoming more mainstream in business, successful B2B case studies are actually pretty thin on the ground. Not surprisingly there is an abundance of consumer examples to choice from. The top five Facebook sites (based on likes) include Coca Cola, Starbucks, Oreo, Red Bull and…
Comscore data highlights consumer mobile behaviour
More than 72 million Americans accessed social networking sites or blogs via their mobile devices in August, 37% up year-on-year from the same time last year, according to data via comScore.
Here are 5 quick observations we can pull out of their data:
Nearly one-third of all U.S. mobile users are now accessing social media services
More than Half of Mobile Social Networkers Access Sites on a Near Daily Basis
Facebook Mobile Audience Approaches 60 Million Users
70 Percent of Mobile Social Networkers Posted a Status Update While on Their Mobile Device
More than half read a post from an organisation, brand or event while on their mobile device
There is no doubt that social networking via mobile devices is on the up-and-up. This is inline of course with sales of such devices, especially smartphones. Comscore also suggest that “This…
LinkedIn brings in status updates for companies
Value/Importance: [rating=5] for B2B!
Recommended link: LinkedIn announcement
Example of new LinkedIn "Company Activity" status updates
Our commentary on the new company status updates
If you use LinkedIn to market your business to other businesses you may remember that LinkedIn introduced Company Follow about 18 months ago. It allows you to setup a company page like in Facebook and others can follow it.
LinkedIn explain:
“Keep in mind your status updates can be up to 500 characters long and can support URLs with multimedia as well. Given that any LinkedIn member can comment, like or share your Company’s status update, this is a great way to build engagement with customers, potential employees and prospects alike”.
To switch on this feature - administrators should read this. I just added an update about this change to our page which…
6 reasons why B2B marketing can succeed on Facebook
There is a growing premise in business marketing that whilst your website is your shop window to the world, you increasingly need to promote yourself and engage with your audience where your audience congregates. AKA "Swim with the Fishes". So, with well over 600 million users, where better than Facebook?
The case for using Facebook for B2B marketing
1. You just can’t argue with the numbers. Whether it's 600 or 700 million, Facebook is the perfect place to cast the net wide. It is reasonable to assume that some of your target customers will be using the site in some way, shape or form. Mostly, though, for real time information and recommendations - which proves the continued importance of good relationships and word of mouth.
2. Facebook is viral by design. You want your content to spread, get it on Facebook. If it is any…
Useful infographic from Marketing Sherpa to promote their forthcoming B2B Marketing Summit. Marketing Sherpa have a lot of data and significant expertise around integrated marketing in the B2B space. Their graphic focusses on key insights on a 5 stage marketing conversion funnel. Here's 3 take-aways that stand out to me:
Based on Sherpa's survey data, the average percentage of leads that buy is 20% - though remember Eloqua's research that 80% of your leads simply buy from someone else! Their lead nurturing presentation on SlideShare is worth a look
One third of B2B businesses have not identified their sales funnel, ouch. Have you!?
Brand reputation and awareness remain relatively low in the minds of B2B marketers when compared to focussing on lead generation or conversion, yet surely that should be hand-in-hand? Maybe building your B2B brand in the thought leadership space (for your market) represents a big opportunity to pull in…
A real-world example of what works for LinkedIn Advertising
What did we do?
I recently launched a B2B social media campaign on LinkedIn and since I noticed there were relatively few live examples, I thought I would share what we found worked or not to help others who are wondering “is it worth it?” and “how do i do it?”.
The background to the campaign was that we had launched a new service for recruitment professionals and we wanted to build brand awareness to associate ourselves with the service and get signups to the service. You will have noticed I can’t be too specific about the service for confidentiality reasons, but I can be more open about how we optimised the ads which I’ll share at the end of the post.
How did we do it?
We were featuring four different products on our website. These were built as Landing Pages with…
How can B2B companies use video to attract, engage and improve conversion without falling into the gimmick trap?
Integrating video into a website and sharing through video sites has great potential to build awareness and establish trust before a transaction. We're now seeing many more marketers using video as discussed in my previous post on inbound B2B marketing. In this post I'll use examples to review different approaches B2B companies can use video to really bring their offering to life.
Using video to help with visibility in search
At the last check, it was estimated that approximately 48 hours of video were being uploaded to YouTube every minute. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how valuable is a video when video search dominates internet search?
This data from YouTube is further supported by a recent survey which confirmed that B2B marketers need to focus on videos and images as part of their SEO…
