Most forms of online B2B marketing and advertising focus on attracting and engaging business customers through a sales cycle to create awareness and interest, through consideration and ultimately to purchase. That’s reasonable since there’s a clear investment and return.
While a lot of social media-savvy business to business companies are leveraging social channels to engage with communities and for customer service, most implementations of corporate social media marketing are no different than any other sales-focused marketing effort. Expectations are high to influence a social return on investment (ROI).
In fact, a recent survey by PulsePoint Group and The Economist Intelligence unit reports that, “Executives who said their companies had established an extensive social media presence reported a return on investment that was more than four times that of companies with little or no social network engagement activity.”
If a picture’s worth a thousand words, then a video must be worth millions. The thing about content marketing is that it’s not just about informing and educating, but creating an experience that your audience can feel. Whether you’re a consumer or business customer, decisions are not made solely on logic, but emotion. As content marketers, we have an opportunity to tie into the experiential state of information influence by leveraging media like video.
[Note from Brian: Please note that Marketo is a client of TopRank Online Marketing]
In the world of B2B online marketing, content and media have been used in a variety of forms to educate and persuade customers across long buying cycles with great success. Over the past few years I’ve heard from many B2B marketers that prospects are leading themselves through much of the initial phases of awareness, interest and consideration by consuming useful content discovered through social channels and published by the brand.
This week at the PRSA Digital Impact Conference Vanessa DiMauro, CEO of Leader Networks talked to attendees about the benefits of online communities as part of a B2B social media strategy.
When you ask an online marketer what frustrates them the most about reaching customers and prospects online you’re likely to hear the following:
