Here is a sample subscription for you. Click here to start your FREE subscription
- Five Steps to a Successful B2B Social Media Strategy
- 35 reasons to host an event for your business
- Joining, talking and participating
- Traditional media + modern tactics = compelling marketing
- It's not who you know (why trust trumps volume)
- More Recent Articles
- Search Matt on Marketing
The beauty of most social media channels is that they're so easy to join and engage. Most are free. It takes just a few minutes to get set up, and literally seconds to start publishing. But if you’re marketing and selling a B2B product, a simple five-step process can ensure you’re getting the maximum, measurable yield from your efforts in terms of increased pipeline size and new sales. Here’s how.
1. Strategize
Social media is mostly about engaging & participating with like-minded others, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need a strategy. Execution without strategy, after all, is really just guessing. That said, creating a strategy for your social media implementation shouldn’t take long. Most important, answer a few basic questions.
Who are your target customers? Are you targeting different types of customers within a target account? Are there deal influencers (inside and outside of the organization) you want to target & influence as well? For each of these groups, think about what you want them to hear, what you need from them, and how all of this translates into the type of content you want to share with them.
This up-front thinking should also extend to the specific social media channels on which you’ll focus. First priority should be external networks where your customers already participate and engage. Could be mass-market channels such as Facebook and Twitter, but it also could be vertical or audience-specific channels elsewhere – like LinkedIn Groups or Ning.
You’ll likely refine this strategy and content/audience focus over time, but thinking about it in advance helps hone the how and where you’ll launch your social media efforts.
2. Publish
With an eye towards the value-added content your audiences will want to read, start publishing. Publish original content, and start commenting on the content of others. This is especially important if you’re using Twitter, as you’ll need a stable of at least 20-30 tweets under your belt before others think you’re relevant, and choose to follow you.
This doesn’t have to be your own content. You know what your audience cares about, and wants to read, so part of your content and publishing strategy should be redistributing content they need. Give credit where credit is due, of course, but there’s a lot of value in filtering and aggregating content from a variety of sources into a single feed for a particular audience.
When publishing on Twitter specifically, use short headlines followed by a “shortened” URL. Use a service like bit.ly to shorten and track your links. Where to find content to republish? Start following a bunch of audience-appropriate blogs and news feeds, and pull interesting headlines out of those feeds to republish. Eventually you’ll want to start publishing your own originated content (we’ll get into why later), but for now you can create value and “follow appeal” from others by using primarily third-party content.
If you’re using Twitter, apply hashtags to your content so that it’s more easily discoverable (and both followable and retweetable) by others. If you’re using Facebook and LinkedIn, take advantage of their “linking” tools to publish content on multiple platforms at once.
3. Follow
The easiest way to start getting the attention of people you want to engage is to follow them first. Use Twitter Search, for example, to find individuals you’d like to follow (and eventually follow you) based on keywords in their own Twitter feeds. Use TweepSearch to find users based on keywords in their Twitter bios. The same would apply within LinkedIn Groups. Spend time every day for awhile finding and following others. On average, between 25-35% of people you follow will follow you back.
Eventually, you can start using tools to automate the task of finding like-minded others to follow. You can search for followers by keywords, hashtag, organization and more.
As you gain followers, you’ll start to get pass-along from those primary followers to their followers. Over time, those secondary followers will follow you directly back, and that process and volume will pick up significantly as your audience grows. This works not just on Twitter, but on other social networks as well. The more you write good content, and help others discover you via that content, the more quickly your reach, influence and return click volume will grow.
4. Engage
Perhaps the most important component of building a healthy social media presence is to engage with your audience. Don’t just publish, don’t just follow. Interaction is key to building trust, credibility and action among those prospective customers.
This engagement can take many shapes. If you’re using Twitter, retweet interesting content from those you follow, and reply to them with ideas and questions. Follow the blogs of your prospective customers, and add comments to their posts. Ask your followers for feedback on new ideas, new messages. Occasionally share pictures, share something personal so they know you’re a human being.
Your engagement strategy will be somewhat custom to your intended audience and what they’re already doing/saying/posting, but engagement in whatever format is important. Without it, you’re not a member of the community – you’re just a lurker. And without becoming an active community member, you won’t get nearly the pass-along and clickthrough value you otherwise could.
5. Convert & Measure
By engaging your network and new community, by becoming one of them, and by significantly increasing the frequency with which they see your name on value-added content and participation, you will naturally and dramatically increase the volume of these prospects who take action to learn more about how you can help their business.
But once you get momentum with your networks, you can also start to feed direct conversion links directly into the conversation. These prospects aren’t ready for a pricing promotion or special purchase offer, that’s probably too early. But give them something value-added for which registration is required. It can be a research report, a sweepstakes entry, a Webinar invitation. The possibilities are endless, but all focused on helping those interested prospects to “raise their hand” so you can have a direct conversation with them.
These aren’t necessary “hot” sales leads. Some may be ready to buy right away, most probably won’t be. With the right lead nurture strategy in place, you can now take these new “hand raisers” and accelerate your direct relationship so that, once they are ready to enter a buying cycle, it goes much faster and has a higher likelihood of conversion.
Constant Contact recently launched event marketing capabilities for their customers, joining companies such as Cvent and EventBrite in making business events easier to organize and promote.
But why host an event in the first place? Here are 35 ideas to steal from, or use as inspiration for a unique event to drive results for your own business.
- Product launch
- Store opening
- Customer training event
- Expert guest speaker
- How-to workshop
- Raise money for a favorite charity
- Book signing
- Town hall meeting
- Focus group
- New product preview
- Private event for your best customers
- Private event for your partners and/or suppliers
- Press conference
- Anniversary celebration
- Birthday celebration
- Free sample party
- Kids Day
- Seniors Night
- College Night
- Celebrity appearance
- BBQ
- Cocktail party
- Black Friday “early access”
- Vendor/supplier fair
- Job fair
- Networking for neighboring businesses
- Group discussion
- Memorial
- Support group
- Book club
- Mastermind group
- Movie marathon
- Concert
- CD release party
- Expansion or remodel completion
There are dozens of reasons I've left out. What can you add? What additional reasons have you used to host an event that drives more awareness, more customers and more sales for your business?
Want credibility with a set of prospective customers? Want to be accepted as one of them, as a part of their tribe?
It takes more than just joining their club. It takes more than just speaking their language, and talking at them.
To be accepted today, you have to participate.
Participation means two-way communication, in an authentic manner, on a regular basis. It takes more time, more effort, and more investment than what we used to be able to do – buy a list, get some PR, write a letter. In other words, talk at the prospect.
Today, prospects require and expect more. If you talk at them (in a letter, a blog post, an article in a trade publication), they expect to be able to talk and comment back. And then, in turn, they expect you to read their response and engage yet again.
It’s more work. And as long as your prospects keep responding, it doesn’t really end. But isn’t that awesome?
The companies you want as your customers aren’t just reading your stuff anymore. They’re responding, engaging, asking you questions, questioning your opinions. They’re getting to know you, and by participating back you’re earning their trust and respect. And if you keep participating, you can earn their business too.
Old-school media is far from dead. We’re watching more TV than ever before, and radio continues to be incredibly influential in local markets, especially during drive time.
As an advertising medium, traditional media such as television and radio aren’t quite as influential and powerful as they once were. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still make them work.
Davis Law Group in Seattle, for example, wants to engage potential local clients who may need help after an accident or injury. They’re using radio advertising as part of their campaign, in this case specifically targeting auto accident victims, but they’re doing two things in particular very well:
1. The voice-over for many of their spots isn’t a company spokesperson or even the desk-based drive-time news anchor. It’s the helicopter-based traffic guy, literally reading (or recording) the ad from the chopper. Where the message comes from (both the reader and the context) are highly relevant and attention-grabbing.
2. Chris Davis doesn’t just tell people to call him. He offers a free e-book to anyone who visits his site (or microsite, as he’s specifically promoting a site featuring the e-book that’s separate from the firm’s main Web presence). It’s a no-obligation, value-added offer that contextually relevant to his business, and focused on engaging potential clients before they get into that accident.
I’m not sure whether Chris is able to measure better performance for this campaign vs. traditional radio campaigns he may have run in the past (Chris, if you’re reading this, drop us a line and we’ll update this post). But he’s definitely using a traditional channel in a smarter way.
The assumption that a big network – thousands of followers on Twitter, an enormous rolodex, a really big mailing list – directly translates into influence and performance is ridiculous. Anybody can build a big list of names.
The more important question is whether those people care about you. Do they respect you? Do they trust you? When called upon, will they help you? Will they buy from you?
The trick is translating that big list into an army of evangelists, a group of individuals who respect and trust you.
That’s how to measure the value of your network. Not by sheer volume, but by trust.
Trust drives influence, and influence enables action.
More Recent Articles
