Making the time to execute on a social media strategy can rattle even the most experienced marketers.  Unlike traditional marketing, social media marketing can present many different challenges and distractions.  According to a study by eMarketer 73% of marketers say finding the time to create content as their biggest marketing challenge.

I recently ran a poll of @TopRank Twitter followers to get a sense of how they spend their time online.  I asked “If you had only 20 minutes a day to spend on social media what would you focus on?”  Some of the answers we received were:

• @henryroominates – “I would try to connect with powerful Twitter users and Tweet content from my blog.”
• @SebastianX – “I’d read my Twitter Followanyday List.”
• @Paco_Belle – “Look at 2-3 Twitter lists, couple circles on G+, scroll Facebook timeline & look through my RSS feeds for new things.”
• @Paramountbuzz – “Engaging others…doing it now.”
• @GreenDolphin_ – “My RSS feed, Twitter, Pinterest, and Facebook.”

If you are involved with implementing social media marketing, you know that 20 minutes a day just won’t cut it.  On top of implementing social media tactics, there’s also the task fo staying current. Lee’s post “11 Ways to Get Smarter & Stay Current in a World of Social Information Overload“ outlined how much time can be involved using social tools to collect, filter and curate social media marketing knowledge.

Avoiding Shiny Object Pitfalls

Reuters estimates that the average worker loses 2.1 hours of productivity every day to interruptions and distractions.  To avoid wasting time begin by prioritizing your week.  While it’s true that unexpected issues can come up plan for the best and the worst.  If you have 3 hours per day on average to complete tasks related to social media strategy what will you get accomplished in those 3 hours?  If you were only to have 1.5 hours per day what would you want to get accomplished?  Proper planning will lead to improved productivity and efficiency.  Also, take some time to determine what your top distractions are and eliminate them.

Optimize for Productivity

Focus on what will have the largest impact on your productivity. Determining what time of day you are most productive, and which activities are most significant will help you to stay on track.  Are you an early riser, night owl, or somewhere in between?  Creating a daily schedule and routine can significantly improve your productivity.  You will also want to keep in mind statistical data which points to the best times of day and days of the week for engaging in social media activity.  A recent infographic by KISSmetrics on “The Science of Social Timing” provides valuable insight into the best times of day to share or engage on sites like Facebook and Twitter.  Some of the findings include:

Twitter

• 5pm – best time to Tweet for re-tweets
• 1-4 per hour – most effective frequency of Tweets
• Midweek & Weekends – best days to Tweet
• Noon & 6pm – best time to Tweet for increase Click Through Rates

Facebook

• Saturday- best day to share on Facebook
• Noon- most effective time to share on Facebook
• .5 per day – best sharing frequency

Tips for an Optimized Focus

Now lets talk about some no brainer “don’ts” that the many of us “do”.  Let me know if any of these sound familiar to you:

• Your best friend is having problems with their significant other so you keep your phone close, just in case…
• It’s baseball season and your team is playing but you don’t have the day off, thank goodness for internet radio right…
• You have email anxiety which forces you to check email every couple minutes because you never know what you might miss…
• One of your colleagues is obsessed with chatting online and pings you every couple minutes with a question or joke…
• You’re scheduling Tweets, posting on your personal facebook page, and reading Psychology Today all at the same time, because after all you are a master multi-tasker…

I too have often thought that I could do everything at once.  A balancing act acquired from years of having too much to do, and not enough time.  I considered multi-tasking an art form and a higher form of organization than my counterparts who only focused on one thing at a time.  I could not have been more wrong.  In recent years I’ve had to buckle down and force myself to devote all of my attention to one task at a time.  I’ve found that the quality of my work has improved and the level of my stress has decreased significantly.  Some tactics that have worked for me include:

• Closing my email when I’m working on social media tasks
• Close all Internet windows and tabs except for the one I need to work on
• Disabling chat or closing chat windows to avoid distraction
• Pick 15 minutes a day to indulge in activities such as checking personal social media profiles, responding to texts, or chatting with friends.
• Spend 30 minutes to an hour each morning reviewing emails and responding, do the same thing before leaving at the end of the day.
• It is significantly easier to stick to your schedule if you are working ONLY on the tasks you have scheduled in the time allotted.

Tools for Optimizing Your Time

Depending on your available time and social media content strategy, there are many tools that can help you accomplish more with less time.  Below are three different types of tools that social media marketers can use to get the most out of their time:

Curation Tools – good for quickly gathering and automatically sharing content

• Scoop.it
• Storify
• Pearltrees

Social Aggregators & Management Tools –  follow and engage with multiple platforms

• Hootsuite
• Tweetdeck
• Seesmic
• Here’s a list of 22 social media management tools

Social Bookmarking – effective means of organizing and storing social bookmarks

• StumleUpon
• Reddit
• Delicious
• Evernote – not a bookmarking tool exactly but very useful for curating

Next Steps

I’m sure you’ll agree that focus and time management are something that most of us can relate to.  Based on what was covered in this post, consider the following questions and determine what you can do to better focus on the tasks at hand:

• What are your top 3 social media goals and do you have a plan for reaching them?
• How much time can you dedicate each day to using tactics to reach these goals?
• What steps can you take to improve your focus while completing social media activities?
• Which type of tool: curation, aggregator, or social bookmarking can you use to help save time?

If  you are looking for additional tips on Optimizing your SEO, social media, and content strategies be sure to take a look at the new book: “Optimize: How to Attract & Engage More Customers By Integrating SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing.”

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. | Optimize Your Social Media Schedule: 4 Tips for Avoiding the Social Media Time Suck | http://www.toprankblog.com

Improved communication turns one time buyers into lifelong customers.

As marketers and sales professionals there is no doubt that we are focused on obtaining new customers and increasing awareness within targeted market segments.  However, we must also consider the lifetime value of our existing customers and how marketing communications can contribute to that relationship.  Taking the time to examine what kind of communications can keep your brand top of mind with customers and inspire continued awareness for repeat sales and referrals is of enormous value.

Do you know how much your current customers are worth to your company?  In recent years research has found that a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits by 25% to 95%.  Armed with the knowledge that satisfied customers has a direct impact on your bottom line, there is no time like the present to begin targeting your current customers.  Here are 5 tips on better customer communications you can start using right now:

Tip #1 – Personalized Email Communication

96% of organizations believe that email personalization can improve email marketing performance.

Creating a steady flow of email communication for customers is not a new concept.  However, how many email campaigns do you send out that are segmented based on purchasing habits or preferences?  Say that you have studied the data relating to your current customers and have identified approximately 5 profiles or personas.  Based on customer information find the persona that best fits each customer.  Then create an email drip campaign for each customer segment with different content based on need.  Keep in mind that the subject line, internal content, and calls to action within the email should be personalized based on customer segment.

Tip #2 – Create A Stellar FAQ Page

53% of customers who shop online more than once a month find customer service extremely or very important.

Creating readily available and easy to find information is Customer Service 101.  It does not matter if you are B2B, B2C, technology, retail, or any other type of company; your customers will have questions.  A Frequently Asked Questions page on your website, social profiles, or other web destinations should be updated on a regular basis to include new questions or comments.  FAQ’s are also an additional opportunity to optimize content for improved visibility online.  It is important to remain consistent with your answers, provide a clean and easy to read page, and update or remove items that may no longer apply.  If you sell multiple products you may want to consider creating additional pages for each product.  Also, if you sell a product or service that requires assembly or setup you may want to provide instructional videos for your customers.

Tip #3 – Social Networking Channels = Customer Service Opportunity

40% of corporate Twitter accounts engage stakeholders on customer service issues.

Last week we shared the example of JetBlue’s customer focused approach on Twitter.  While Twitter may not be a customer solution for all marketers there is an opportunity to utilize your existing social media channels as a way of providing additional customer service for your customers.  Customer service does not only include answering questions or dealing with problems it could also include: sharing useful articles or information, notifying customers of upcoming promotions, or reaching out to customers that are inactive.  Consideration must also be paid to the time of day that your customers are most likely to spend their time online.  There are tools available like Timely, Buffer or Hootsuite which enable you to schedule your Twitter communications during a particular time of day for the highest impact.

Tip #4 – Create Content Based on Customer Need

36% of B2B marketers listed producing engaging content as their biggest content marketing challenge.

If planned for and organized appropriately, content creation can be executed efficiently and successfully.  A successful content strategy will focus on the needs, pain points, and triggers of your customers.  There are many ways to identify what those needs are including: customer surveys, research, and creation of customer personas based on buying habits.  Implementing a well thought out and concise customer survey can give you additional insight into what makes your customers tick.  A survey is also a great opportunity to crowdsource content from your customers for your customers.  Who better qualified to tell you what they want to read about than those who are purchasing your products or services?

Tip #5 – Turn Customers Into Brand Advocates

500 billion peer impressions are created each year.

It is extremely important that you tap into your existing customer base to find individuals or organizations who are willing to advocate on your behalf.  You could ask customers for: written or video testimonials, permission to use them as references, or employ them as a brand advocate to share information with their networks.  As user generated content becomes increasingly popular and credible, keeping your customers happy will continue to become even more essential.

Action Items:

Committing to providing customer support online is something that I recommend every company do no matter what industry you work in.  If you don’t keep your customers happy, someone else will.  I would like to leave you with the following questions that I hope will help you determine what tactics your company should implement to improve your customer service and communication online.

• How would you rate your current level of online customer service?
• Do you currently have a plan in place to improve your communication?
• What tactics have you implemented that have worked?
• What companies do you personally buy from that provide excellent online communication?
• What impact has that communication had on your purchasing decisions?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. | 5 Marketing Tips for Improving Customer Relationships & ROI With Better Communications | http://www.toprankblog.com

Is your social media strategy sending your customers mixed signals?

As a B2B organization with a focus on technology, you may believe that you are facing additional obstacles that your B2C counterparts are not.

Many of you have tried to implement social media in the past without much success.  However, you may still believe that B2C companies have it easier because they have a direct line to their consumers.  The good news is, you do too!  In fact, 58% of IT buyers use social media to make tech buying decisions.

Getting in front of the proper decision makers and influencers when selling SaaS, IT, or any other technology is not as hard as you may think.  It is imperative that you follow a series of social media best practices directed at finding, engaging, and motivating your social network to take action.

Developing Social Media Personas

The first rule of social media for technology companies is to know your customers.  How can you connect with your customers if you don’t know who they are?  Well developed personas will help you answer a variety of questions about your customers including:

• Where they spend time online
• How they interact on social chanels
• What type of information they share most frequently
• What motivates them to interact, buy and refer

Establish A Voice & Stick With It

The growing pains associated with implementing a social media strategy often include finding a defined voice and direction for your brand.  While you may be working with an internal or outsourced team to execute your social media strategy, you must find consistency.  A good first step is to sit down with your team and discuss your company mission, goals, offering, and pain points of your customers to determine how information should be presented.  Then take some time to research your top 5 competitors and see what type of interaction and success they are having with their campaigns.

Confusing Content Kills Network Growth

While there is nothing wrong with providing a variety of information on your business profiles it is key that you remain consistent.  If you are targeting CFO’s responsible for technology purchases at large organizations, it is important that the content provided is helpful, informational, and aimed at solving their business problems.  It can get tricky when you are targeting multiple decision makers and influencers like the buying groups often associated with B2B purchases, so be mindful of exactly who your audience is and what type of content and context will have the desired impact.

Facts Tell & Stories Sell

When selling a complex solution or service, sharing stories about customers that you have helped can be of enormous value.  It’s true that your typical CFO or purchasing manager will be very mindful of the ROI associated with purchasing your product. But do not underestimate the power of a well written client case study or testimonial.  A client story will add validity to your message, which is of enormous value when marketing via social media.  Keep in mind that you are asking for an investment, and in order to gain the trust of that customer you may need to provide additional information that builds trust.

If you have a more traditional marketing background try to remember that many of the same basic marketing principles apply to social media marketing.  It is extremely valuable to  research your customers, find consistency in branding, create cohesive content, and share meaningful customer stories.

If you are just beginning to develop an online marketing strategy or are a social media networking professional I would recommend running a social media audit of your existing social media marketing program and incorporating the tactics included in this post.  Not sure where to start?  You can always contact the team at TopRank for additional information on what is involved and where to begin.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2012. | Technology Marketing: Is Your B2B Social Media Strategy Sending Mixed Signals? | http://www.toprankblog.com

[Note from Lee: We didn't include second editions, re-releases in paperback or books that didn't have cover images uploaded yet.]

Mobile, Local, Location Based Marketing

Mobilized Marketing: Drive Sales, Engagement, and Loyalty Through Mobile Marketing (Wiley) by Jeff Hasen

Jeff Hasen, CMO of mobile marketing forerunner Hipcricket, provides timely mobile strategies and tactics leveraging his experience from more than 130,000 past campaigns.  As mobile marketing continues to move to the forefront of the marketing world, the insight Hasen provides into mobile optimization, budgeting, and measurement should prove to be indispensable in 2012.

Go Mobile: Location-Based Marketing, Apps, Mobile Optimized Ad Campaigns, 2D Codes and Other Mobile Strategies to Grow Your Business  (Wiley) by Jeanne Hopkins and Jamie Turner

Go Mobile offers a step by step guide for mobile marketing in 2012.  It includes practical campaign instructions in order to develop a mobile website, deploy SMS for business, utilize QR codes, leverage mobile apps and more. One can also benefit from strategic instructions to use location based marketing in order to build your customers base and how to integrate social media into mobile campaigns.

Search & Social Media Marketing

Social Media Intelligence: Extracting Knowledge from the Fire Hose of Conversations (Que) by  Sally Falkow

Upcoming in June of 2012, Social Media Intelligence illustrates how to use the leading social media analytics tools in order to gauge the effectiveness of social media marketing and make strategic decisions. Sally Falkow will guide you in moving from reactive brand monitoring to proactive information gathering in order to take advantage of business opportunities. This is a great read for those looking to progress from just doing social media to using it as an effective piece of their marketing strategy.

Google+ for Business: How Google’s Social Network Changes Everything  (Que) by Chris Brogan

The much buzzed about Google+ seems likely to have a big impact on search in 2012.  Author, Chris Brogan, discusses how businesses should be taking advantage of the newest social network and defines those strategies and tactics to use for business.

Content Marketing

Optimize: How to Attract and Engage More Customer by Integrating SEO, Social Media, and Content Marketing (Wiley) by Lee Odden

TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden helps companies develop an optimized and socialized content marketing strategy to attain new levels of customer acquisition and engagement in 2012.  Balancing the practical with the innovative, Optimize is ideal for those marketers that want a more effective content marketing strategy that wins and retains more customers, builds thought leadership and dominates the competition. Scheduled for release mid-March 2012.

Content is Currency: Developing Powder Content for Web and Mobile (Nicholas Brealey Publishing) by Jon Wuebben

Already receiving great reviews, Content is Currency, by Jon Wuebben delivers practical instructions and step by step guides to manage content through four key phases: Creation, Optimization, Distribution and Curation.  This book is a great opportunity for business owners and marketers to understand how to create content which will engage their audience and drive results.

B2B Marketing

The B2B Social Media Book: Become a Marketing Superstar by Generating Leads with Blogging, LinkedIN, Twitter, Facebook, Email, and More (Wiley) by Kipp Bodnar and Jeffrey L. Cohen

The B2B Social Media Book is the ultimate reference guide for B2B marketers looking to expand their knowledge of social media strategy and contribute to their business growth.  Readers will discover actionable items for leveraging blogs, LinkedIN, Facebook, Twitter and more to form the cornerstone of their B2B marketing strategies.

B2B Digital Marketing: Using the Web to Market Directly to Businesses (Que) by Michael Miler

B2B Digital Marketing looks to be a great resource for B2B marketers interested in learning how to sell directly to other businesses using digital marketing. Leading with a broad summary and then diving into individual channel tactics for strategy, implementation and measurement, B2B Digital Marketing is another good guide for those looking for a B2B marketing overview.

There are many books publishing in 2012 that promise to introduce us to new ways to strategize, develop online marketing plans and deploy campaigns across a variety of channels. What books are you anxiously awaiting in 2012?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Top Online Marketing Books for 2012 | http://www.toprankblog.com

According to a recent release by ComScore, nearly 3 billion search queries contain local terms each month.  For companies that have a local presence, top visibility on local search is essential or that traffic will simply go to competitors.  Google Maps is one of the most frequently used local search destinations and even comes standard on many devices including the iPhone.  Google Places provides a great opportunity to begin marketing on a local level to your potential customers.

A best practice approach to local online marketing will greatly increase your chances of success.  The Google Places optimization tips listed below will help you create or modify your Google Places page to become more relevant to both search engines and potential customers.  I’ve also included suggestions on how this .

Consistency Is Key

It is important that your Google Place profile contains the same information as any other profiles your company may have online. Google Place pages create another opportunity to build trust and consistency as part of your marketing strategy. Be sure to audit your other profiles and answer each question as consistently as you can.  There are some additional ways you can create consistency on your profiles such as:

• Linking: improve searchability by linking your additional profiles together
• Imagery: utilizing the same imagery on multiple place pages will create consistency
• Branding: consistency in naming and referencing your brand is extremely important

*Content Marketing Tip: Go back to basics.

• Are you using the same contact information for each of your social profiles or business pages?
• Do each of your social profiles or business pages reflect your current management team or employees?

Complete All Information (Even if it is Not Required)

Have you ever heard the expression “better off safe than sorry”?  Take the same approach when setting up or editing your Google Places profile.  There may be questions that you consider irrelevent but could ultimately have an impact on how you are found online.  Make sure that you are filling out all standard information including:

• Company Name
• Address
• Phone Number
• Website
• Email Address

Adding additional elements to your page such as photos or videos are also an opportunity to optimize your content and share a little bit more about your company with your prospective clients.

*Content Marketing Tip: Take an audit of your other local and social based marketing initiatives.

• Have you completed each profile to the best of your ability?
• Can you repurpose some of your existing content for your Google Place page?
• Brand focused images used on other social profiles can be repurposed for your company Google Places page.

Encourage Interaction & Reviews

User generated content can be a very powerful optimization tool.  Actual customers may be using additional or different keywords or phrases to describe their experience with you.  Reviews also add validity to your statements and information written by your company.  Nothing speaks higher of a company than the testimonials of it’s customers.  I would recommend encouraging customers or clients to participate or simply urge them to visit your page and see what they think.  Some additional ways that you could encourage interaction would be:

• Posting video testimonials on your Google Places page
• Encourage clients to upload photos of themselves at your establishment or with your team

*Content Marketing Tip: Moderate, moderate, moderate.

• Are you currently moderating comments on your blog, website, or social profiles?
• Are you making a point to interact with your potential customers online?

Keywords

Including relevant and purposeful keywords in your Google Place profile is a strategic way to increase optimization.  However, you will want to avoid over stuffing your description with keywords or utilizing keywords in your business name that are not relevant to your offering. Do your research up front utilizing your analytics account to determine what keywords are appropriate for your business.

*Content Marketing Tip: To create an effective strategy you must research, implement, and adapt.

• Use keywords in your file names to improve optimization
• Update your information frequently to provide fresh content

Focus on Your Specialties

Do not be afraid to add details about your service offering, solutions, or products that will help your customers find you.  A simple analysis of your google analytics account can tell you what keywords users are searching for to find your company.  Do your best to use those descriptions in your company overview and specialities area.

• Think of what your customers will be looking for and provide imagery or documentation that will show your expertise.

The example included above separates this company from their competition.  I would venture to say that of the companies that came up in my search this for “Tire Repair, Minneapolis” their profile was the most consistent and complete.  Instead of having to further investigate on the company on their website I was given adequate information which would led me to contacting them immediately.

An optimized Google Places page is a marketing tactic that does not take a lot of effort but can have a very large impact on your searchability.  As with any online marketing strategy it is important that you present factual and consistent information for your customers or clients.  If you are ready to get started or make some change to your existing profile be sure to visit Google’s Getting Started page which will help you through the process.  Do you have an idea of how many of your customers have found you on Google Places? If so have you encouraged them to interact with your page and share feedback?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | 5 Tips for Content Marketers on Google Places Optimization | http://www.toprankblog.com

New Report on B2B Content Marketing for 2012:

This week started off right with the new report (pdf) from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs:  ”B2B Content Marketing: 2012 Benchmarks, Budgets & Trends”. The report offers a great mix of insight into most and least effective content marketing tactics, social media tools, measurement, budgets and compelling data points like:

• 9 in 10 organizations market with content
• Content marketers use 8 different content marketing tactics (on average) in their mix
• The most popular content marketing tactics included social media, blogs, newsletters, case studies and events
• The least effective content marketing tactics: podcasts, mobile content, digital magazines

While SEO is mentioned in the context of measurement, “SEO Ranking”, there is no other mention of the role of search engine optimization in relation to content marketing in the entire report.  Either questions were not asked that allowed SEO to be indicated as a response or this is further evidence of the disconnect between content marketers and the role of search optimization as a key traffic driver for content. Either way, it reinforces our evangelism at TopRank for companies to invest in content creation as well as optimization and promotion. #optimize

Bloggers Beware:

“Crystal Cox, Oregon Blogger, Isn’t a Journalist, Concludes U.S. Court –Imposes $2.5 Million Judgement on Her”  Cox’s interview with Seattle Weekly sheds some light on a sticky situation.  One of Crystal Cox blogs contained highly critical information about a particular financial company and it’s co-founder.  The prosecution was able to convince the court that because Cox is not affiliated with a specific newspaper, magazine, news service, or network she is not covered under Oregon’s media shield law and therefore can be fined.  Via Seattle Weekly.

Brands New Twitter:

“The New Twitter: Everything You Need to Know” Twitter has revealed a slew of new features and design including Brand pages (like Google+ and Facebook). New features and labeling include: Home (news feed), Connect (Your @replies), Discover (Personalized news stream), Me (Your profile). Along with these revisions are brand pages which are customizable and the ability to embed individual tweets in web pages. Verdict? Did we ask for these changes Twitter? Via Mashable and Twitter.

In Google We Trust: But Does Google Trust You?

“Are You Trusted by Google?”  Determining how Google calculates reputation scores has long been a mystery.  This article provides resources that give some teasers into how Google might use these scores but there is still no information provided on how exactly reputation scores are calculated.  Google’s new Agent Rank provides some clarification when it comes to +1 scores and as predicted, they are not all created equal.  Via SEO by the Sea.

Mobile is Your Daddy:

“How the Mobile Web Changes the SEO Landscape”  Mobile Internet usage is said to surpass desktop usage by 2014.  Something worth noting is that the way that users search using their mobile devices is also very different.  This presents a threat as well as an excellent opportunity for marketers to optimize for mobile.  This article provides some interesting insights into some of the ways that Internet usage is about to change. Via Forbes.

Dodging Social Media Risk:

“Too Many Wrong Messages on Social Media?  Try Leadership, Not Control”  Many organizations have found that the type of information their employees are sharing on social media reflects poorly on their brand and may have severe consequences.   The question many companies face is should they control the way that their employees share?   This article shares some great tips for educating employees on the do’s and don’ts of social media.  Via Social Business News.

SEO is the Bomb for SMBs:

“Survey Says SEO the Single Most Important Marketing Channel for SMBs”  A recent study by MerchantCircle/Reply.com surveyed 2,500 small business owners with some surprising results.  Search Engine Optimization is the marketing channel 32.9% of marketers would use if they had to choose just one making it the front runner by a landslide.  Facebook also ranked high as the most common marketing tool being used to promote their business online.   Via Search Engine Land.

Nominate TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog

“Nominate Your Favorite Social Media Blog: 3rd Annual Top 10 Social Media Blog Contest” Social Media Examiner is taking nominations for your favorite blogs that cover social media topics. Online Marketing Blog ranked #2 in this list of prestigious blogs along with Brian Solis, Jay Baer, Mitch Joel, Jason Falls, Olivier Blanchard, Gini Dietrich and many others. Please take a moment to nominate TopRankBlog.com for the 2012 list Via Social Media Examiner.

Was there any news this week that you think would be of interest to our readers?  As always we welcome any feedback that you have regarding our blog and what you would like to see more of.  Have a great weekend and we hope to see you again next week.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | A-to-Z Internet Marketing News: Bloggers Beware, Google Trust, Mobile SEO, New Twitter, SMBs Heart SEO | http://www.toprankblog.com

Can Customers Find Your Content?

Content creation is so much more than marketing, it is a way of engaging and enticing potential customers to take action.  Optimized content can make sure that customers interact with your brand.  There are many types of content that companies publish and many different audiences that a company should interact with.  Content creation is one of the most effective form of online marketing, it also happens to be the most difficult.

Tip 1: Popular B2B Content Tactics

If 90% of B2B marketers are using content creation as part of their tactics what are the most popular tactics for releasing this information?

• Social Media
• Articles
• Events
• eNewsletters
• Blogs

Tip 2: What Can Be Searched Can Be Optimized

Any type of content that shows up in a result from a search engine is an opportunity for optimization.  What are some examples of content that can be optimized?

• Products and Services
• Corporate Information
• News/Press Releases
• Help, FAQ
• Knowledgebase
• Job Listings
• Landing Pages
• Fulfillment
• Curated/Aggregated
• Media: Video, Audio, Images
• Blogs
• Tweets
• Status Updates
• Comments
• Tags
• MS Office Docs
• PDF files

Tip 3: Customers Use Multiple Resources

Odden asked members of the audience if they have ever asked for something such as a restaurant recommendation from their social network and then took that information and validated it using a search engine.  It was a unanimous yes!  Be aware that accuracy and multiple points of communication and information will make it much easier for customers to find and interact with your brand.

Tip 4: Identify Your Customer Segments & Personas

There is a set of questions that each company should ask themselves about their customer’s online behavior before launching a content strategy.  Those questions would include:

• What are your customers content preferences?
• How do they discover, consumer, and share content?
• What are they looking for on search engines and discussing on the social web?

Tip 5: Ideas For Creating Better Content

In addition to content planning and an implementation strategy there are six very helpful ideas for creating content as part of an online strategy.

• Engage with your community an pull from that experience
• Don’t be afraid to ask for topics
• Look at popular questions on sites such as Yahoo Answers and LinkedIn Q/A for inspiration
• Mine web analytics data to determine which keywords and questions drive traffic
• Review the logged queries from your internal search engine
• Turn to your staff to see what they are being asked most often
• Monitor Journalist queries on HARO for story ideas

Key Takeaways

A holistic approach to content creation and optimization proves to be more sustainable long term.  As we saw there are many ways to optimize current content (in multiple forms) and create better content based on the information that can be collected about your customers.  Were there any other tips that members of the audience found to be useful in our journey through content creation today?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | 5 Essential Tips on Content Marketing & Optimization #SESCHI | http://www.toprankblog.com

• How the value of what marketers do is often viewed incorrectly
• Mistakes that many marketers are guilty of
• What questions marketers should ask themselves in order to invest marketing dollars appropriately

Changing the Marketing Conversation
Often times, as marketers we talk too tactically

Many marketers today still refer to marketing dollars as “spend”, “budgets”, or “cost centers”. One of the things that Chertudi urges online marketers to do is change the conversation. What does this mean?  Organizations should begin considering marketing costs as an investment and not just a cost. Instead of focusing on the “burn rate” we are urged to focus on determining if our investment is large enough to fuel the growth of the company. This will enable marketing to be properly viewed as a means of growing the organization instead of being perceived as a cost center.

Alleged Counts of Being Convinced Guilty
What we know we should do better, but don’t

Marketers often are aware of the areas within their department that require improvement but they simply don’t take the time to make adjustments. What are the different types of marketers and what are they guilty of?

• Guilty Marketers: Those knowingly operating in a suboptimal fashion and wasting budget.
• Wishful Marketers: Those hoping their efforts are positively impacting business but are lacking evidence.
• Clueless Marketers: Those that should know better, but no one has stated the obvious.

The 7 Counts of Marketing Guilt
1. Lack of clear strategy and objectives
2. Sloppy efforts to track and measure
3. Assuming Too Much
4. Too much science
5. Too much art
6. Short-term vs. long-term oriented
7. Unauthentic

Negligent Acts of Wishfulness aka Cluelessness
According to Chertudi there are 3 types of negligent acts committed by marketers on a regular basis.

Misunderstanding the Business: Organizations often invest funds into the top of the funnel without understanding how it truly impacts the bottom line. As marketers we need to really understand how it is that our business operates.

Organizational and Tactic Silos: Considering the impact that one form of marketing has on another is key in forming strategy. By properly utilizing technology we can better understand these silos and how they work together.

Improperly Attributing Attribution Models: The majority of marketers are not aware of what models they are using. If you don’t understand the difference between last click, first, all, even, and weighted models you are leaving money on the table as a result.

Investing Correctly
Questions that every CMO should Ask

1. Which words do we use? As marketers it is important to shift focus from marketing spend to ROI by quantifying results in terms of sales.
2. Do we validate what we assume to know? If we are making assumptions we should be aware of how largely these assumptions impact our bottom line.
3. Do we have a clear way to measure and track results? Proper implementation of marketing measurement tools and the diligence to de-duplicate results if needed will help us to track our results.
4. Attribute to the real results and what are the financial outcomes? Tracking the impact of marketing results and the financial outcomes is essential for proper measurement.
5. Can we attribute attribution correctly? Over 98% of marketers cannot do this correctly because they do not have the right set of tools.
6. Is your marketing department behaving like a team? Each segment of your marketing department is working towards a common goal of increased sales. Knowing how each of these marketing initiatives works and what impact they have on growth something that all marketers need to know.
7. Can you balance the left brain and the right brain? There needs to be a proper balance between art and science. Just because something works doesn’t mean that it is always the correct course of action.

Depending on the size and nature of your business there are many impacts large and small that marketing investment can have on your company. It is imperative that marketers continue to focus on accountability and real measures of attribution as they impact the bottom line.

For our readers, I’m curious to know what marketing “sin” are you most guilty of? What do you know you should be doing better but haven’t been able to? Is Marketing viewed as an “investment” or a “cost center” in your organization?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Are You A Guilty Marketer? Opening Keynote at #SESCHI by Mikel Chertudi of Adobe | http://www.toprankblog.com

For many years search has been the backbone of internet marketing. While effective on its own for a range of marketing objectives, namely product sales and lead generation, it’s the integration with other digital marketing tactics that can really elevate marketing program effectiveness.

It’s important for marketers to think more holistically about their search marketing programs because with brands and consumers empowered to publish 24/7 via mobile, tablet or computer, we live in an age of information overload. Increased competition for consumer attention, interest and engagement means marketing messages must do more to stand out and focus not only on transactional outcomes, but influence and branding.

For consumers, Google has been an effective filter for the billions of documents in its index handling over 11 billion searches per month on Google.com alone. But search isn’t enough to carry the day in most internet marketing programs.

There are challenges for marketers and for Google in anticipating changing consumer interests and the language used with search activity. Of the daily queries on Google, 16% have never been seen before. How can you keyword optimize and advertise for what’s never been searched on? How can advertisers tap into the ebb and flow of relevant topics that represent consumer interest, word of mouth and influence?

A bit part of that solution is the shift towards optimizing for customers and outcomes vs. a sole focus on keywords.  Search terms are often seen as an objective when they are really a manifestation of what buyers care about relevant to the brand’s offering. Understanding customer needs, pain points and interests is the gateway to mining keyword data effectively. Of course determining keyword performance with organic search (with Google) is becoming much more difficult. However, Google AdWords advertisers won’t have that problem since keyword referrer data is not being masked on PPC traffic.

Search ads are highly effective and according to Google, search advertisers realize a 7:1 ROI on investments in search-based internet marketing.  But search is changing even faster than in the past with continuous improvements in infrastructure and technology, changing online consumer behaviors and of course the growing influence of social media and mobile. Companies have not necessarily been quick to adapt to such changes as evidenced (for example) by the fact that only 33% of advertisers have a mobile optimized website.

Social media has been capturing the biggest share of media attention in the internet marketing world and it’s often warranted. Social networks have facilitated major changes from revolutionizing online gaming to facilitating revolutions in countries.  However, social media investment is a kitten’s meow compared to the lion’s roar of search marketing budgets.

According to Forrester’s most recent Interactive Marketing Forecasts (2011 – 2016) for the U.S., interactive spend is to reach $76.6 billion by 2016. While social media spending will increase about 6% in that time, 43% of the overall interactive forecast by 2016 will be search marketing.

That said, the combination of social and search may be even more powerful and as marketers realize the benefit of integration, many will see significant returns. This is something we’ve been proponents of for many years at TopRank Online Marketing whether it’s optimizing social media content for better visibility in search results to incorporating social sharing features in online advertising and media.

The combination of social media with search is more than compelling. GroupM and comScore published a report called “The Virtuous Circle: The Role of Search and Social Media in the Purchase Pathway” which revealed that only 1% of respondents were led to purchase by social media alone. More than half (51%) arrived at purchase by search alone and 48% by a combination of search and social media. For even casual observers of the internet marketing space, it’s easy to see that the effect of that combined interaction will only increase in the future.

In response to the massive competition for online attention and changes in both consumer behaviors and expectations, I believe there are 3 areas marketers can optimize for a more strategic and holistic approach to successful internet marketing:

1. Optimize for Discovery – How does your target audience prefer to find information? Search, Social, Email, Advertising, Word of Mouth. What devices do they use? When are they most likley to search, socialize or purchase?

2. Optimize for Consumption – What content formats and media types does your community prefer? Do they like long or short form? Text, images, audio or video?

3. Optimize for Engagement – What messages, topics and contexts motivate your community to interact, share and convert?

There’s a diversity of influences for consumers as they discover, consume and engage with content and advertising messages online. An integrated approach that empathizes with consumer needs, pain points and position in the buying cycle will help marketers improve their relevance and effectiveness while providing for a better user experience with their target audience.

Within the universe of customer influences and experiences there’s a constellation of opportunities for online marketers to attract, inspire and engage their target audiences.  A holistic mix of paid, owned, earned and social media provides marketers a much better platform for attracting, engaging and activating customers. The question for marketers to answer is, “Do you know enough about your customers, where they spend time online, what they’re influenced by and what key messages and experiences with motivate them to action?”

How are you integrating paid search or even organic search with social media, content, email and other forms of online marketing?  Have you had any obstacles in getting integrated search programs budgeted? Implemented?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | The Power of Integrated Search Marketing in a Social Media World | http://www.toprankblog.com

Does Your Inbox Look Like This?

We’ve all received them and we’ve all sent them. They can be given but they can’t be taken back. It’s a single action that can cause people to unfriend, unfollow, or unsubscribe.  What are they?  Emails!  Emails can inspire, engage, or excite your prospects or customers but can have the opposite effect of what you were aiming for if you don’t follow some simple rules.

Creating an effective email marketing campaign is not always an easy task.  However, there are a few things to keep in mind that may help take some of the fear out of launching your own campaign.  Not every campaign will be successful but if you’re good about analyzing results, admitting shortcomings and making changes, who says you can’t learn from your mistakes?

#1 – Please, Please, Please Don’t Spam!
It’s 8am on Monday and you’re frantically trying to catch up on emails from the weekend.  A subject line catches your eye “Thank You For Meeting Me.”  This must be from someone you know, right? WRONG.  Once you open the email you receive a message on ways you can generate millions of dollars without lifting a finger. All it requires is a “small” investment on your part.  Although this is an extreme example of spamming, it is important that you keep this example in mind when creating your own campaigns.  Be honest about who you are and try to offer something of value.

#2 – Have A Plan (Or Else)
Nothing hurts an email campaign more than inconsistent messaging and lack of direction.  Your sales and marketing message should be aligned and you MUST have a plan for distributing your content.  Email campaigns should always be written for your target audience.  If you are targeting different decision makers in different industries, guess what?  You will have to adapt your approach to meet the needs of your customer segment.your prospect base customer segment.  Email is not always a “one size fits all” solution, but it should still follow a consistent process with end goals in mind.

#3 – Easy On the Eyes –  Fuel For the Brain
Your email is likely 1 of 1,000 sitting unread in your prospect’s email inbox.  If you have written a subject line that is compelling enough to get them to open, it’s important that you keep their attention, or they’ll just delete or move on to the next message.  Make sure that your emails are scanable.  Include bullet points with USEFUL and INTERESTING information.  For example, an email  that is 5 paragraphs long will not only lose the attention of your audience, but will cause readers to hesitate opening the next message from you that comes to their inbox.

#4 –  Don’t Trip Up: Set Next Steps
So, you’ve managed to get in front of your target audience and they’ve read your email.  Now what?  NEVER leave it up to your audience to decide what the next steps are.  Offer some sort of call to action such as a specific and relevant offer, recommending a date and time you can speak further, or a link to some useful information.

#5 – Make Content Sharable
If possible, embed sharable icons to your email communication.  Why?  If your audience does have interest in the message  you’ve shared and would like to distribute that message to their own network it is  important to make it as easy as possible for readers to extend the reach of your email message to social networks at large.  Just think: If even just a fraction of your target audience are sharing your information, how many more users and prospective clients that will put you in front of?

#6 – Whatever You Do, Make Sure to Analyze Your Data
You can learn a lot about your audience from your email analytics.  Whether you are using a CRM tool to send out emails (like Salesforce) or an email marketing platform (like Constant Contact) be sure to watch email campaign performance metrics as closely as you can.  Of the emails sent, how many were actually opened?  Which links were clicked on the most?  How many times was your content shared with the users’ social network? Which offers resulted in the most conversions?

What Should We Always Keep In Mind With Email Marketing?
Email marketing campaigns are comprised of many moving pieces.  By following a few simple best practice rules including plan development, setting next steps, and knowing your analytics you have the recipe for a successful and measurable email marketing campaign.

I’m curious to know what email marketing strategies have worked for your company in the past?  I am also very interested in hearing about some of the challenges that you’ve faced and what you’ve taken away from those experiences.   The only way we get better is if we keep learning, tweaking, and adapting the way that we are executing our email marketing strategy.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | 6 Tips For More Effective Email Marketing Campaigns | http://www.toprankblog.com

[Note from Lee: Social Business is everybody's business when it comes to modern internet marketing. IBM's social business efforts are really at the forefront of this trend. Ben Edwards is the VP of Digital Strategy at IBM and leads the strategy, design and development of IBM's marketing and communications in the digital realm. Ben joins us today to share his insights into the journey of not only embracing the social web for external marketing, but to adapt and adopt social media tools internally to empower socialized marketing.]

Companies of all shapes and sizes, in every industry, are increasingly adopting social media strategies and technologies for their marketing efforts, using Facebook to reach out to customers or YouTube to demonstrate new products. These are good first steps, but there is so much more that “social” has to offer. The era of social business is here and it is becoming clear just how transformative it will be for B2B marketers.

In order to fully realize the power of social business as a marketer, you must be willing to embrace the transition from outbound marketing to social media and digitally enabled inbound marketing. Here are several ways to start socializing your marketing efforts on your journey to becoming a social business marketer.

Expertise Location — Connecting experts with customers, prospects, and the knowledge seeking public

The days of businesses limiting or even entirely restricting employees’ access to the Internet and social media platforms are gone. Today, organizations are realizing the power of their employees’ activity on social media platforms. If the average employee has 150 connections on LinkedIn, that’s millions of connections with customers, prospects, business partners and the knowledge seeking public.

The challenges of communicating through these channels is first, educating your employees on how to get involved in social computing and then, connecting the right employee with the right customer through social, digital experiences. Remember communication through social channels is about engaging in conversation. It’s about helping those prospects that might be interested in your products and services, making sure they are speaking with employees who have expertise in that area.

Today’s social business marketer must work behind the scenes to create a system for internal expertise location to ensure that the right employee is participating in the right social experience at the right time with the right audience. As a B2B organization, your brand is experienced through its people— not through the products— you want to make sure that your very best people are well equipped to interact with the ecosystem of customers, prospects, partners and more. Once experts are identified, marketers can help them prepare for being surfaced in digital experiences over social media platforms and even the corporate website. That’s what an expertise location system is all about. It can aid you in supporting and growing your organization’s brand and eminence in the marketplace and twofold, will help your employees to further extend their personal eminence and reputation in the markets which your organization serves.

Crowdsourcing – Encouraging participation through open social technologies

Many brands today want to embrace social, but are wary of quality control and the risk of disruptive crowdslapping over social media platforms, open communities and forums. Carefully managed crowdsourcing can provide a safe solution to these concerns and can help with increasing brand awareness, harnessing ideas and innovation, and taking your next step towards becoming a social business.

Crowdsourcing is not a new concept for marketers, but social business marketers today are pushing the envelope through the use of open social technologies to engage with their communities. Today’s crowdsourcing is about inviting clients, consultants, and employees to contribute in the pursuit of new ideas, to evaluate and enter new markets, to gain customer feedback, and to understand market trends.

Crowdsourcing through the use of open social technologies allows organizations to mobilize the passionate special-interest groups to not only carry a brand message but also to lead and take part in activities on behalf of the brand. This is a unique opportunity for marketers who believe in the power of social collaboration to contribute to innovative ideas and viewpoints, to learn from others with common interests and to influence the future of the business landscape.

Community Creation – Creating social and digital experiences to collaborate, listen and engage

Similar to the idea of crowdsourcing, building online communities where your prospects and constituencies can gather to share ideas and collaborate can be a powerful social marketing tool. But, community building isn’t easy. You need to understand the market view and niche you’re looking to target. What does the market want? Are they looking for an objective approach or one that’s vendor-driven? Once your market is defined and a community created, you as a marketer have the opportunity to listen to the needs and concerns of potential customers, while also engaging and bouncing ideas back and forth, collaboratively.

For example, developerWorks is an online social network and technical resource center created by IBM for software developers, IT professionals, and students worldwide. The community site attracts 4 million unique visitors per month in 195 countries and is designed to help users develop skills, solve problems, collaborate with peers, and stay ahead of the latest trends in open standards. In addition to the technical information available, IBM created a MydeveloperWorks community to help users build relationships with technical professionals who have similar interests and debate and collaborate for ideal solutions to tough technical questions. Within the community, users can take advantage of groups and activities for easier collaboration, profiles and blogs to gain personal recognition, and a personalized landing page that brings them content matched to their interests for increased productivity.

Creating a community like developerWorks not only provides the marketer with insights into what the technical software developer is interested in, what they need to be satisfied in the market, but also provides a level of trust between the organization and its constituencies. It’s not about pushing marketing content out to the public, it’s about creating a community that encourages collaboration and innovation while driving brand awareness.

Leading edge companies recognize that they can’t afford to relegate social technologies to people’s personal lives and are instead implementing social tools and concepts to drive the brand and ultimately, their organization’s bottom line. Likewise marketers are embracing the social tools are their disposal and implementing them in creative ways like expertise location, open crowdsourcing and community involvement to engage customers and prospects, to build brand loyalty, and to gain market insight. This is what makes a social business marketer – embracing the networks of people and expertise you have internally and engaging your external communities through social, digital interactions to create new business value and opportunities.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | The Journey to Social Business Marketing | http://www.toprankblog.com

#1: Flying By the Seat of Your Pants

A “lets throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks” approach will only take you so far in social media.  Consider your internet marketing plan to be just as essential as your traditional sales and marketing plans.  Below are some questions you may want to ask yourself when creating your social content marketing strategy:

• What is the goal of the campaign?
• Who am I writing this content for?
• What are they interested in?
• How do I plan on reaching my goals?
• What results am I anticipating?
• What actions need to be taken in order to create the most favorable results?

#2: Whoops! We Forgot to Optimize Our Social Media Profiles

Consider your social media campaigns your offsite SEO.  What does this mean?  Create content for your social campaigns the same way you would for your website.  This means determining which keywords your audience is searching for, create relevant content utilizing those keywords, and be sure to adapt these as needed.  Some things you may want to keep in mind.

• Is your company profile optimized with proper keywords?
• Are all of your social media profiles leading back to the same URL?
• Is your contact information clearly highlighted & easily accessible?

#3: Avoiding Reacting to Negative Feedback

It is unrealistic to assume that there will never be negative feedback about your company.  The internet is a sounding board for users to share their opinions, experience with companies or feedback on products. Pretty much any thing you can think of people have something to say about it.   While you can’t control every detail of a users experience (or who they share it with) you can control how your business responds to their feedback.

• Utilize social media tracking tools so you can deal with issues as quickly as possible.
• Respond to the commenters directly and work to mend the relationship if possible.
• If necessary, invite the dissenter to discuss the issue offline.
• Share and reward positive comments to build even better relationships with satisfied clients/customers.

#4: Failing to Measure the Success of Your Campaign

You’ve dedicated time, money, and resources to creating an online presence but what do you have to show for it?  Effective measurement is key in running a successful social media marketing program.  There are many free and paid tools on the market that will assist you in properly measuring your success from Google Analytics to Trackur.  What are some of the metrics you should always make sure you’re watching?

• The number of conversions your company has generated from a social marketing strategy.
• Which social sites resonate best with your prospects and clients.
• The topics that seem to generate the most interest.
• The level of engagement and interest your prospects and clients show in your company.
• Sign-ups, inquiries, leads and sales.
• Length of sales cycle.
• Revenue per order or deal.

Social Media is becoming more and more essential for B2B companies of any size. When you look at the trends and data, it’s easy to think of social as the new normal.   Are you confident in your corporate social media strategy?  An important step in the right direction is to determine your corporate social media readiness. Is your B2B business ready to be a social business?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | 4 B2B Social Media & SEO Blunders to Avoid | http://www.toprankblog.com

Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance

There are 5 key steps that each marketer must take to create a successful social media campaign.  What does this include?

• Listening to what is being said online
• Assessing the marketplace
• Engaging with current and prospective clients
• Measuring is a way for us to optimize
• Improving our strategy as we learn more

According to Hemann listening and measurement are the two most important ingredients for success.  You cannot successfully execute on one without the other.  Below are a few of the best practice approaches that Hemann shared with the audience at today’s session.

Understand What Simply Listening Can & Cannot Do

• Optimize your content in real time
• Create a better customer experience
• Quickly learn about potential product issues
• Marketing through conversation
• Gain valuable business intelligence

Create A Solid Social Media Strategy

• Planning and beginning and ending stages is essential
• Internal resources for facilitating and executing is critical
• You can’t listen to everything so fine tune your process
• Don’t rely on just one tool for quantifying results

Tools & Reporting: Questions Every Company Should Ask Themselves

• Has your internal team decided on the tools you want to use?
• Is there a training and implementation schedule in place?
• Has a process for reporting been scheduled?
• Do you know what your competition is doing?

Myths & Misconceptions To Avoid

• Social media cannot be measured: You collect dozens of data points each day that assist in measuring your social media efforts.
• ROI stands for something other than return on investment: ROI does not refer to influence or engagement it is directly related to gaining or saving the company money.
• Social media measurement is different than traditional media measurement: Social media is measured by utilizing a series of strategies and tactics just as you would with any other effort.
• Social media is meant to be organic and we already have too much data: You can never have too much data!

Never Forget the Five W’s

• What people are saying about your brand.
• Where they are talking about your brand.
• When people are talking about your brand.
• Who is talking about your brand.
• Why people are talking about your brand.

Common Measurement Questions You Should Always Keep In Mind

• How many people did we reach?
• Did the program create conversation?
• How do I get ad equivalency so the brand can compare this to our advertising?
• Were our fans/followers engaged?

What Is Our Take Away From This Afternoon’s Session?

• No subject is unapproachable
• This is a step-by-step process
• Gaining access to quality data provides a huge competitive advantage

[Note from Lee: Chuck has published his presentation online so take a look below for the full presentation. Thanks Chuck!]

There are many ways to effectively track social media metrics for B2B sales.  What tools have you found to be effective for social media measurement?

Stay tuned for more posts from MIMA Summit 2011.  Follow the hashtag #MIMASummit on Twitter and watch for any posts on @toprank or @azeckman to see updates and photos from the conference.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | #MIMASummit: 6 Tips for Developing a Best Practices Approach to Social Media Measurement | http://www.toprankblog.com

It’s one thing to create a content marketing strategy, it’s another thing to execute it in a way that works out the way you planned.

Buyer experience is important! 43.7% of buyers say they’re taking more time to research purchases. (DemandGen Report) Each person receives 5,000 messages each day (and that stat is 2 years old) imagine what it is today. The amount of information that confronts each person online every day is overwhelming, so people begin to shut down or become better filters of information.

66% of buyers say the vendor’s website influenced their purchase decision (DemandGen Report). However, a problem exists when people SEO their website content so much that it’s not a compelling or useful user experience. Being found doesn’t mean much if the content doesn’t engage prospects.

Content is marketing currency

Attention is a capacity to maintain selective or sustained concentration. Instead of chasing a quantity of fans, friends and followers, focus on creating the best match between brand and social connections. Look at metrics like time on site, return visits, CTR on calls to action vs only how many Twitter followers or Facebook fans there are.

• Cursory Attention: I might be interested
• Misleading Attention: Thinking of your content but also 10 other things
• Voluntary Attention: Every time I read their stuff I learn something useful. You need to cultivate these connections. They will not become buyers unless their attention becomes:
• Intentional Attention: This information will help me solve a problem I’m dealing with. I wonder what else they can help me with…

The only way to guide prospects through these levels of attention is if you connect your content marketing to guide them through the experience.

Most marketers focus on pre marketing qualified leads and do not nurture. Most prospects don’t contact vendors until they’ve formed their shortlist.

The buying cycle starts with interest and attention, but it’s no longer a proper funnel. Especially in the middle where other people from the buying committee are brought in. Then it narrows again as the shortlist is narrowed.

B2B Buying Process: Status Quo, Priority, Research, Options, Step Back, Validation, Choice

Buyer Experience Funnel: Interest, Attention, Value, Engagement, Buying Committee Involvement, Conversation, Purchase

Ardath is big on marketing automation. Software is critical for nurturing and handling scale.

A key question when developing a content marketing strategy is: “What could cause the prospect to kill the deal?” When the buyer committee members that have not been involved in the buying process come in and start asking questions. When executing our content strategy, we need to have answers to those questions and potential objections. We need to empower the buyer champion so they can provide confidence to their peers.

The secrets to a better buyer experience:  Questions, Conversations & Stories

Questions initiate conversations. When prospects initiate their search for a solution, they often search. It’s essential to understand the overlay between Buyer Experience and Buying Stage. Anticipate corresponding Buyer Questions. Think of the questions your prospects will have in the varying stages of their experience and the stages they go through during the process.

Those questions will help you formulate meaningful content that stimulates conversations with prospects. Content can Simulate sales dialog, ask/answer questions and counter objections. Always remember what you want the prospect to do next.

The story companies tell:

Beginning: You need our products, we’re the leading provider
Middle: Look at our feeds and speeds. You looked – you want to buy?
End: FUD – You’ll perish without us. We can beat that price.

A lot of companies tell this story and nobody cares. Compare it to:

Beginning: We know the buyer. We educate the buyer that there’s a problem. Pain escalates.
Middle: The buyer seeks a resolution. They will encounter obstacles, so help them. They will seek to find expertise (hopefully yours).
End: Overcome challenges. Solve the problem. Buyer is the hero.

It’s not about your company. It’s about the buyer.

Content that builds a better buyer experience:

Education: Where, What, When, Why How (not about the product, about the problem that they’re solving)

Expertise: Industry Trends, Methodology, Strategic Insights, Futuristic. (Add your take on general trends – what does this mean to your customers and what they care about) Show that you have more to offer than the product. Are you a partner or a vendor? Give enough actionable information for prospects to implement and see an effect so they come back for the “rest of it”.

Evidence: Customer Stories, Analysts, Earned Media, Reputation, Credibility. Build trust – people buy from people they trust.

Mix up your format choices because it’s not so much the format, but the content.

Content Hubs Keep You On Track and help you get the most out of your content. Example: Webinar

Pre Event:

• Registration page
• Email invites
• Tweets
• LinkedIn
• Press Release
• BlogPosts

Post Event:

• Slideshare
• Email Archive Link
• Q & A Blog Post
• White Paper
• Article Series
• Podcast(s)

Build in Momentum Accelerators

• Connected Content
• Follow-on Offers
• Calls to Action
• Conversational Takeaways

If you answer a question with your content, make sure there’s a takeaway. This is how you get your ideas in conversations where you’re not present. If you can do that, you can facilitate the sales process.

This session was rich with great ideas and I wish I’d been able to get a few of the process and content hub slides. However, I did capture a ton of information as you’ve read above. The practical approach and attention to approaching content from a customer needs perspective.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Build a Better Buyer Experience with Marketing Content #cmworld | http://www.toprankblog.com

The B2B Track during day one of Content Marketing World in the “Gold Room” was jam packed for each session. That includes this session about Corporate Blogging and Globalizing your Editorial with two speakers from SAS and Intel. Since the topics were so different, I decided to split the liveblog post into two. This is part one.

Speaker: Alison Bolen @alisonbolen Content Editor SAS
Presentation: Results-Driven Blogging for B2B Brands

Alison’s presentation focused on corporate blogging and the blog program at SAS (a $2 billion business analytics company).

The history of SAS and social media started in 1976 with the first SAS Global Forum, 2004 internal blog program, 2006 SAS communities launched, 2007 the first external blog launched and in 2011 the transition to the WordPress platform. You can find SAS blogs here: blogs.sas.com

Alison works in the Public Relations organization at SAS along with 8 other corporate journalists.

How to Grow a Corporate Blogging Program

Develop a strategy: Find out where the current corporate strategies are and find a hook into them. For the SAS blogging program, there were 3 main goals: to align with PR, Marketing and Customer Support.

Blogging supports each stage of the funnel:

• Identify the problem / opportunity
• Research solutions
• Evaluate
• Consider
• Purchase

SAS blog efforts are meta data enabled: by persona, by category, by industry. For content to be relevant and valuable it must be persona based and aligned with steps in the buying process.

The next step in corporate blogging strategy development is to find the right content. Ask these important questions: Where do stories live? (Word Docs, PPTs, Videos, Live Events) Where does knowledge live? (Sharepoint, White papers)

Now it’s time to find the right people. Alison gave the example of two SAS bloggers that write for distinct audiences.

Blog Planning with Monthly Assignments. All posts are due on a specific date each month. The most timely posts are published first. Breaking news and fillers are published as relevant. A schedule ensures there is content to work with each month.

Another planning option is to focus on one specific topic. For example, each Quarter, focus on a specific topic for each blogging contributing to that particular blog.

Another angle on corporate blog planning involves themes every week. Example: Monday (Getting Started Articles) Wednesdays (Topics the Blogger is Trying to Learn & Documenting that Process) Friday (Posts in reaction to a particular topic from other blogs)

Tap Internal Subject Matter Experts: If the organizational structure supports it, you can divide blogging assignments by areas of specialization. Example: 16 Think Tank team members for healthcare at SAS that includes authors who specialize in specific areas. They are assigned to blog on their area of expertise at least once a month.

Have a blog that new bloggers can contribute to in order to show their commitment. SAS also has an internal blog network of 700+ bloggers that also acts as a testing ground.

If you have a group blog, you must have an editor. No assignments and nobody in charge = NO CONTENT. A blog editor is a content chaser, people watcher and project manager – not necessarily a corporate communications person.

For events, plan across blogs as needed. Map topics and aspects of the events to be covered by the different blogs in your organization to ensure coverage.

If blogs don’t work out, retire them.

Coach and advise, don’t micromanage. Be patient with different learning styles. Don’t pre-judge and expect too much.

Results: Customer Support – Positive comments and links to your blogs.
Results: Marketing – Bloggers invited to speak at conferences, getting calls from journalists, posts picked up by industry publications and bloggers getting invites to write books
Results: The New PR – Journalists contacting SAS after seeing blog posts. It’s the new PR.
Results: The Blog is the top news source on the sas.com website. In fact. compared to other news pages on the SAS site, the blogging effort is blowing other content out of the water in terms of traffic.

I think Alison gave some really useful ideas for blog content and planning. One of the most common objections I hear from companies that really should be blogging (and not all companies should) is that they have difficulty with creating content on an ongoing basis. It’s a big mind shift and kudos to SAS for having 8 Corporate Journalists on staff.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | SAS on Results-Driven Blogging for B2B Brands #cmworld | http://www.toprankblog.com

Speaker: Pam Didner @pdidner Global Integrated Marketing Manager, Intel
Presentation: Intel Inside Out: How to Globalize Your Editorial Planning

Pam’s presentation covered her journey over the past year and a half to “try” and globalize Intel’s editorial planning.

Intel’s 2011 Marketing Objectives and Strategy:
- Objective: Increase Intel’s brand relevance
- The Hero (Product):  Intel Core Processors (i3, i5, i7)
- Audience: IT Managers
- Communications Strategy: Signal business advantages, Stimulate interests, Engage with IT.

The challenge is engagement, because Intel is an ingredient brand. Consumers cannot touch or feel their product directly, so how is Intel supposed to engage? Intel promotes with new product launches but afterwards, their promotion machine “goes dark” – no engagement.

Social and Search are rewriting the rules of audience engagement.

A Scalable Editorial Planning Process

The Holy Grail: Tight collaboration between HQ (Corporate Marketing) and the Geo (Geo is how Intel defines areas of business in other parts of the world)

1. Prioritize countries and topics (HQ w/geo feedback)
2. Finalize editorial timeline (HQ)
3. Create Geo editorial collatoral (HQ + Geo)
4a. Create topics marketing kit (HQ)
4b. Craft engagement plan (Geo)
5. Share engagement results (Geo)
6. Refine Editorial Planning, Marketing Kit (HQ w/geo feedback)

Once you develop a list of topics, you can consolidate, especially at a higher level.

Global Editorial Calendar:
Planned topics, Product launches
Geos should have the discretion at to which topics they want to focus on.

Real-time marketing is great, but planning is also very important. At Intel, the Global Editorial Calendar is established 6 months in advance.

Who owns content, Headquarters or Geographies? The answer is, “it depends”. For a small company, it might make more sense for the Geo to control content. For a big company like Intel, HQ needs to drive content, but with Geo collaboration.

Topic Maketing Kit
- What’s the Intel story? What does Intel have to say about the topic? (Legal approved)
Geos can take that story, copy and paste as they need to.
- Messaging and positioning: Long and short form, sound bites
- Search terms – what are the search phrases relevant and popular to the topic?
- A list of content pieces – Case studies, webinar, social media conversation guide

The kit is pretty comprehensive for the Geo it’s created for.

HQ creates the top level content but the Geos are responsible for localizing and marketing execution.

Topic Marketing Kit is the Hub, surrounded by engagement tactics: Search Optimization, Targeted Ads, Public Realtions, Landing Pages, Local Marketing, Direct Marketing, Co-Marketing

Key Learnings from Intel:
- There’s a long lead time necessary for producing a Topic Marketing Kit (12-14 weeks). Three topics is ideal.
- Get up and personal with all Geos. There need to be clear roles and responsibilities between HQ and the Geos
- Content is King and creative is the Queen. That means storytelling with simple creative that is headline driven. If you use people shots, understand you’ll need to customize for the region. Try to create compelling content that does not require a lot of customization.

The Geo’s job is to create an implementation plan and to execute, measure results.

Challenges:
- Getting Geos to customize content is difficult.
- How do you scale an editorial board to 5 geos? For U.S. the editorial board is working, but getting it to scale globally is not – yet.
- The marketing kit takes 12-14 weeks, so good luck with “real-time” marketing. When PR monitors social media and reaches out in certain situations, that’s real time marketing. But for marketing to monitor for opportunities and to react in a global fashion, it’s a lot more difficult.

These were some great Global or International Content Marketing insights from Pam. I think this is a huge area of growth as content marketing becomes a bigger part of mainstream online marketing in international markets.

Pam showed her quick wit and sense of humor when the projector showed double images, her reaction was that this was a 3D presentation and that we should have brought our 3D glasses.  :)  Great job Pam!

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Intel Inside Out: How to Globalize Your Editorial Planning #cmworld | http://www.toprankblog.com

At Dreamforce this week, Robert Wollan – Global Managing Partner for Accenture CRM, attempted to answer that question with his presentation: “Making $ocial Media Pay – With (Really) Fast Followers.

Most C-level execs are finding that traditional channels are not delivering the results that they had in the past. At the same time, they’re trying to capture new growth potential through disruptive forces and emerging channels like social. Conversations need to happen about social in the boardroom and at C-levels in order to affect real change in the organization.

Successful social leaders get past the hype of individual social tools and focus more on the specific social media behaviors that can lead to revenue growth. What are the behaviors inside and outside the organization that can be capitalized on to generate revenue? Social media is a catalyst for change to better go after digital consumers.

Key considerations: speed, mobile, real-time, behaviors.

1. Pick a strategy before it picks you. Most companies get into social media

• Uh, Oh strategy. A viral event from a customer or employee
• It’s too big not to be there strategy
• Response to a competitor

How many of our customers are social media active? Where? What do they do? How can we leverage social participation to affect business outcomes?

2. You’re not on stage anymore. Welcome into the crowd. Marketing and sales needs to adjust speed and be more agile.

3. Social Media is not just a new channel. It’s not like commerce where we have a new place to sell. What’s going to change if we become a successful social enterprise? What needs to change in the organization in order for the company to be successful? Social media is a catalyst for organizational change.

4. The time for experimentation is up. It’s time to mobilize the masses. Social media isn’t just about marketing, it’s about integrating social media into the way the organization operates and collaborates. HR needs to be involved from day one.

DNA of the Really Fast Follower:

It’s a convoluted path from the Enterprise to the Consumer. Early examples of social media focused on certain types of businesses, so it’s important to understand what part of the DNA chain makes the most sense to optimize through social media.

• BtoB relationships
• BtoC relationships
• PtoP relationships

Figure out where social media can make a difference at the end of the day.

Three places to optimize for social:

1. Create lead opportunities with social
2. Speed to leads and better matching leads.
3. Cutting costs, being more efficient

A Sales Community that brings B2B sales teams together includes:

• Sales Best Practices
• Sales Training
• Market Intelligence
• Process Support
• Sales Planning
• Sales Incentives
• Sales and Marketing Materials

With Business to Consumer, the opportunity that stands out is “speed to consumer” through fast innovation and knowledge arbitrage. (Lee: You gotta love the vernacular of consultancies)

To get going with the social web, the different levels of engagement are typically:

• Listen (Learn & Adapt)
• Engage (Build your own network)
• Optimize (Drive Innovation)

Listening Examples:
USAA embedded social listening into operational execution. They don’t look at social media data as another set of reports, but as central. Social data is the essence of how they understand their customers. Those social insights are incorporated into how they operate – it’s part of the culture.

Samsung uses social listening across the ecosystem. They tap into social in order to innovate by understand what their customers want. What is learned in social media affects operational choices made. Social isn’t just treated as a special project.

Engagement Examples:
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia launched a campaign to grow underserved market segments. The effect of the campaign was amplified through social media, which was directed towards female entreprenuers.

Dell has engaged by identifying and mobilizing influencers across multiple functions. They’ve launched the listening center. Watch the video below for more insight into Dell’s listening strategy:

Wet Seal is an online retailer focused on reaching young women that’s redefining the shopping experience. They create engagement amongst customers by providing the ability to assemble outfits and virtually interact with the product.

Optimize Example:

Best Buy decided to launch a tool to extend their tech expertise beyond stores and the website through Twelpforce on Twitter. Best Buy engagement with customers and employees helps to solve problems. If you have a question, tweet @twelpforce and you’ll get an answer from one of 12,000 employees competing to answer the fastest and best. In the first year, Twelpforce has driven down customer complaints by 20%.

Key benefits of the Twelpforce model include speed and connecting questions with the best people to answer, which isn’t practical in a call center situation. Service is a differentiator for Best Buy over other electronics retailers.

The things to get right for really fast followers:

1. Act now. The time for experimentation is behind us
2. Embrace social media with digital and mobility. Don’t isolate it.
3. Make sure everyone across the enterprise is aligned to an outcome.
4. Untangle the technology complexity and address questions of how social media will be applied to the business
5. Empower the front line people of your organization
6. Social media needs to be a cC-Suite imperative. Don’t delegate it down in the organization.

I think some of the important takeaways from this presentation is a focus on understanding behaviors (vs starting with social applications) and how they can impact business outcomes. Also, there’s no time to wait, businesses need to figure out where social fits in their organization, NOW.  The rate of change and social adoption by consumers, buyers and the competition is happening so fast, that coming into the world of social enterprise late, could put a company at an uncomfortable disadvantage.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | Making Social Media Pay – With (Really) Fast Followers – Accenture #df11 | http://www.toprankblog.com

Once B2B companies realize that buyers discover, consume and share information on social channels just like any other “human” they seek to understand how social participation and marketing fits.

The session, “B2B Social Media: Not As Different As You Think” at Dreamforce in San Francisco aimed to help answer that question with presentations from three B2B Social Media Marketing practitioners. The speakers included: Gordon Evans from salesforce.com, Brian Stokoe from Caterpillar, and Maura Ginty from Autodesk.

Godon did introductions and opened things up with an audience poll, asking how many people were on Twitter, blog and have a social strategy.

First up is Maura Ginty from Autodesk, Senior Manager of Strategy and Innovation. Autodesk provides 3D software for architecture, engineering, manufacturing and entertainment industries. Maura has initiated search and social media programs at Autodesk. If you’ve sat in a building, used a product or watched a movie, you’ve probably been touched by Autodesk software.

How did Audodesk start with social media? Starting with individual tactics, they wanted to look at social a bit differently. They use a multiple hub and spoke model. Social Media Vision in the long term is to foster social media innovations.  This isn’t just in marketing, but across the organization.

The focus is social from product to marketing to sales and went experimental with 20 people to over 100 and a more formal social strategy in 2 years.  They added social features into a consumer product, they monitor Twitter for customer service opportunities and engage with a community on Facebook with over 500,000 fans.

Social isn’t about shouting, it’s about “answering the phone” from your customers

Next up is Brian Stokoe from Caterpillar who is responsible for all public facing social media there. Caterpillar has over 100,000 employees and revenues of over $40 billion. They have 24 brands and over 20 customer industry segments, so there is a diversity of considerations for how they participate on the social web.

Caterpillar started by creating a social presence on sites like Facebook and Twitter, which worked well because people familiar with the brand expected them there. But they had to take a step back and start to consider the variety of needs for their different customer segments. Previously, they would promote a message to Facebook, but that wasn’t necessarily relevant to all customer groups.

They look at each customer segment and decide what mix of social presence is appropriate: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Forums, etc. vs. publishing one destination for the whole company. By creating unique social destinations for each segment, Caterpillar better serves it’s customers with relevant information and experience.

Q and A on B2B Social Media:

Neither Brian or Maura are part of PR and Communications departments, which is in contrast with how social media is governed in most organizations. Maura mentioned that Autodesk social media efforts worked with PR from the start.

Brian mentioned one of the customer segments his social media efforts addresses are the the audience for PR and that Caterpillar has embraced PR use of social monitoring and engagement.

Gordon: Are your goals at your company to empower all employees to be ambassadors for your company?

Maura: We want to tap into that enthusiasm. We have guidelines for participation. It helps you

Brian: It goes back to the policy we have for employees regarding social media. We want employees to show their expertise, be smart about disclosure and proprietary information. On centralized sites like Facebook or Twitter, the expectation is that the message of Caterpillar be managed through a company spokesperson. But when it comes to forums, employees can jump in as appropriate.

Gordon: What’s a good listening strategy for B2B?

Maura: The first thing you can list for are brand keywords. What’s happening with the brands and other identifiers like the tasks prospects want to complete. There’s some back and forth between what words customer are using and how you want to be known for. Understanding the how customers see things is important.

Brian: With Caterpillar, there were challenges because of “cat” and “Caterpillar” meaning different things.  As for listening, attention is paid to the differences in customer segments.

Gordon: Do you monitor your competitors?

Brian: Yes

Maura: If you’re going to listen, why not listen to the industry?

Gordon: What are you measuring?

Brian: We have an extensive metrics program. We look at it as a value funnel. We gather info for awareness and put some context to it to identify value. As the interactions get further down the buying funnel, that’s where the rubber hits the road. It’s important to tie social media metrics to business objectives, not just reputation.

Maura: Our social media center of excellence collaborates to determine what we should measure.

Gordon: How important is your video strategy as a B2B company?

Brian: For us yes, much of what we do is very visual. One thing we’ve identified is that there’s no reason to re-create the wheel with video hosting – people watch videos on YouTube, so that’s what we use.

Maura: We determined that YouTube was a great place for use to participate through Net Promoter score. We have almost 14 million views on YouTube so far.

Brian: A lot of organizations come from a world of high video production and we’ve found authenticity is more important. Actual experiences and the rugged reality of using our product better connects with the audience.

Gordon: Can you give advice on how to evolve your channel or dealers through social media propgrams?

Maura: We include them in social media training. There’s more work to do there

Brian: Dealers are a critical part of Caterpillar. They carry their own brand in dealing with customers. It’s important to us that dealers have training and guidelines so customers have a congruent experience.

Audience Q: Do you actively pursue and engage key influencers?

Brian: Yes, especially in forums who help out. Whether it’s tossing them a CAT hat or publicly recognizing them, we strive to keep them involved.

Audience Q: How did you segment social media efforts by customer segment?

Brian: I borrowed somewhat from an Enterprise strategy that had similar considerations for the differences in customer groups.

There was more Q & A but I needed the time to wrap up this post so I’d have time to work on the morning keynote post.  A great session overall and good insights into how B2B companies have actually implemented social strategies in their companies. Along the lines of this topic, here are a few good posts that share specific resources for B2B social media: infographics, reports.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | B2B & Social Media, Not As Different As You Think: Autodesk, Caterpillar at #DF11 | http://www.toprankblog.com

A salesforce that functions as educators, consultants and in some ways “subject matter experts”, can be a formidable asset for corporate social media efforts towards engagement and customer acquisition. Rather than shutting down individual sales reps blogs and Facebook accounts until corporate gets their social strategy in place, companies should consider how to coordinate and empower sales teams as social media ambassadors of the brand to their individual circles of influence and social networks.

Those same sales people are already maintaining contact with prospects and customers through other communication channels like email, phone, snail mail and newsletters. Why not social networking and media sites?

As business managers decide how to best leverage sales people for social media objectives, here are a few ideas on tactics they may decide to implement:

1. Create a Destination - Whether it’s a blog, tumblr, posterous site, YouTube or even Facebook Fan page, a destination for social participation can serve as the hub for a salesperson’s social media activity. This is where social content is published, aggregated and curated. It’s also where calls to action, offers and invitations to engage on a more business level can be posted. The social hub scan serve as a destination for other publishers and bloggers to link to and appear within search results.

2. Monitor for Leads & Engagement – As more consumer and B2B buyers participate on the social web during the discovery and consideration phases of the buying cycle, sales people can monitor for comments and conversations that indicate engagement opportunities. IBM’s Listen for Leads program has uncovered millions of dollars in sales by monitoring social media sites for keywords that indicate prospects with questions or in the search phase.

Simple tools like search.twitter.com, board reader or a variety of Facebook search engines can provide access to discussions. Free social search engines like socialmention.com or topsy can also be used along with Google Alerts. Ideally, a robust social media monitoring tool would be used that includes advanced filtering options.  It takes some refinement of search queries to make this kind of monitoring work, but can be very effective at identifying prospect conversation opportunities at their greatest moment of need.

3. Create, Curate & Repurpose - Most Sales Reps, Account Executives and Business Development people that I know are pretty busy, so efficiency with social media and content is essential. With an understanding of relevant search keywords and social topics that matter to prospective customers, salespeople can create a content plan as a guide.

However, creating new content on a regular basis while maintaining high quality can become a challenge, so it’s important to think about where content can be repurposed.

For example, salespeople might each maintain their own blogs that they publish to once a week. But they might also share portions or customized versions of their blog posts with other industry blogs, online publications and industry newsletters. They could compile blog posts into ebooks or could be used within corporate content marketing materials.

An effective way to become a “go to destination” for information on a particular topic is to aggregate or curate news from different sources on the web to the salesperson’s hub.  Subscribe to other industry news sites, newsletter and setup Google Alerts for topics of interest to collect news. Collect the most interesting and/or themed news of the week and add short comments.  The same curation tactic can be used to create a newsletter. With some practice, the process of scanning headlines and putting together a weekly news roundup can be done in only a few minutes a day, resulting in one beefy blog post per week.

4. Participate - In the course of researching useful industry news to aggregate or to cite in original blog posts, salespeople will undoubtedly find other blogs and online publications that allow commenting. They’ll also find others discussing topics of interest on sites like LinkedIn, Groups & Forums, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and others. Searching or monitoring for prospects also reveals these kinds of interaction opportunities.

Answering questions, sharing useful resources and asking questions on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ helps communicate personal characteristics and thought leadership for the salesperson. Corporate marketing might be able to use their resources with social media monitoring tools to identify social channels, groups or individuals that are most influential and relevant.  Salespeople could also use tools like Klout to find others with influence to engage with.

This can seem like a very time consuming task, but many salespeople who are the most productive with lead generation through social media make a consistent effort to participate on a frequent basis. Setup a recurring reminder in Outlook to spend 15 minutes each morning to ask/answer questions, collect, aggregate and share useful links. Spreading this activity over several days using a consistent amount of time is very productive. Schedule Tweets and Facebook updates during the day in advance using a tool like Hootsuite.

5. Collaborate - Corporate sales and marketing leadership can keep tabs on the most effective uses of social media and networking sites by their sales teams and create best practices for the benefit of all. Continuously improved processes, new social tool evaluations and tactics evolution can improve salesforce social media effectiveness and overall ability to create value and engage prospects.

In the end, it’s about empowerment, not control.

Companies can provide sales teams with templates, process and training plus regular internal networking opportunities to share best practices in order to help salesforce social media efforts succeed.  It’s also important to provide ongoing education so salespeople know what it looks like to be overzealous and forward with their social participation efforts.

As with all social media marketing efforts, mileage varies according to the target audience, industry, resources and sales teams capabilities. There’s no doubt that strategy alone doesn’t sustain long term social media marketing success. Ongoing training and feedback mechanisms are essential to improve skills and identify both productive and non-productive behaviors.

Has your organization had to deal with “rogue sales reps” initiating social media marketing efforts? How did you handle them?  Have you implemented or observed other companies effectively incorporating sales teams social media participation as part of corporate social strategy?

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | 5 Ways Salespeople Can Use Social Media to Grow Leads | http://www.toprankblog.com

B2B Marketing Best Practices 2011

We’ve been fans of MarketingSherpa reports, guides and handbooks for many years, recently reviewing their SEO Benchmark Report for 2011. As passionate B2B Marketers, we’re always on the lookout for qualitative information to improve our B2B client marketing as well as our own. That’s why I’m pretty motivated by the new 2011 B2B Marketing Advanced Practices Handbook from MarketingSherpa.

Led by Senior Research Analyst, Jen Doyle, this Handbook is nearly 200 pages of research based best practices, graphs, worksheets and of course, their FUEL Methodology for elevating B2B Marketing effectiveness. Here’s a rundown of the report:

According to MarketingSherpa, the top concerns of B2B Marketers revolve around getting more value and revenue out of limited resources – all in a fast paced world of increasing competition. Prioritizing resources for maximum impact is critical and MarketingSherpa has developed a methodology called, FUEL that works as a blueprint for B2B Marketing success.

Here’s what the FUEL acronym stands for:

F: Find and attract leads – Strategy to personas to tactical plan.
U: Uncover qualified leads – Lead scoring, nurturing and management.
E: Establish automated marketing processes – Automate for efficiency and scale.
L: Lift results – Continuous improvement and C-Level reporting.

MarketingSherpa provides a model for B2B Marketers to determine their maturity level: Trial Phase, Transition Phase and Strategic Phase as a baseline for making strategic changes to improve process and efficiency. In MarketingSherpa’s research, 50% of participants were Strategic, 36% were in Transition and 14% were in Trial with no formal process or guidelines.

Effective B2B lead generation involves know which tactics are most effective.  MarketingSherpa’s research shows that websites, webinars, email and SEO are the most effective.

Within the area of B2B Search Engine Optimization tactics, the creation of content was rated by MarketingSherpa’s research as the most effective and requiring the most effort. I guess that’s why so many B2B companies hire TopRank  On page optimization, link building and blogging were also highly rated SEO tactics for their impact.

The research data, case studies, screenshots, worksheets and insights provided in this Handbook will require readers to roll up their virtual sleeves and do some honest assessment. But the payoff will be a much more effective program that is worth many multiples of the cost of the report, which is $347 for the pdf version.

In fact, here’s a list of the worksheets included in the Handbook to give you an idea of the range of content and outputs you’ll get:

• Initial perceptions of buyer personas
• Questions to ask internal departments in developing buyer personas
• Questions to ask customers and prospects in developing buyer personas
• Recruiting a marketing-sales alignment team
• Qualities of qualified and unqualified leads
• Questions to ask when selecting a marketing automation platform
• Marketing automation vendor evaluation sheet
• Evaluating lead generation performance
• Questions to ask in evaluating marketing performance
• Marketing performance benchmarks

While I think the B2B Marketing Advanced Practices Handbook is a great tool and source of information, the endorsement from our client, Jon Miller of Marketo, provides the best summary I’ve read yet:

“The 2011 B2B Marketing Advanced Practices Handbook is a great “all-in-one” resource for B2B marketers, especially those of us who are responsible for driving revenue for the sales team. The FUEL methodology and associated marketing maturity model provide best practices for companies regardless of whether they are starting out with no processes, maturing with informal processes, or undergoing strategic optimization. The handbook tells you which tactics work – and which don’t – for generating leads, and then it goes on to talk about how to turn those leads into revenue, including practical advice for lead nurturing and lead scoring, automating the processes using marketing automation, and measuring results. If you’re looking for a one-stop-shot to take your B2B marketing to the next level, this handbook is for you!”

To get a free preview of the report or for more information and to get a copy, visit the MarketingSherpa site.

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© Online Marketing Blog, 2011. | B2B Marketing Best Practices – MarketingSherpa 2011 Handbook | http://www.toprankblog.com