Posts Tagged ‘digital relationships’

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How to Avoid the Seven Deadly Marketing Sins

Monday, October 17th, 2011

Here’s a cartoon from Tom Fishburne of Brand Camp. I love it because, as all good cartoons should, it reflects reality.

Seven Deadly Sins Cartoon How to Avoid the Seven Deadly Marketing Sins

What should you do instead?

  1. Get creative. Treat each new campaign as if the whole world has changed since the last one (because it has – even if the last one was yesterday).
  2. Be aware of your competitors, but don’t imitate them. Be better. Work harder. Add more value (yes, your marketing should deliver value to your prospects).
  3. Social media ‘likes’ are a good thing, but they aren’t the point. The point is to nurture prospects with useful and relevant content. Useful and relevant content builds trust. Trust sells.
  4. Fancy ad shoots are fun, and sometimes they’re worthwhile… but do a cost/benefit analysis before spending your client’s (or employer’s) money.
  5. Partnering with any affiliate who will have you is lazy and risky. Be selective. Have a good reason for linking your product/service/brand with another company’s, and research them for potential liabilities.
  6. Don’t spam. Just don’t.
  7. Everybody enjoys a pat on  the back, but awards should be a byproduct of your efforts… not their objective.

Do you have a reaction to Tom’s cartoon you’d like to share?

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Posted in acSellerant, content marketing, content/social media marketing, digital relationships, execution, social media, trust | 3 Comments »

Content Curation – the Savior of SMB Marketers

Tuesday, April 5th, 2011

We know content/social media marketing is highly effective, yet for SMBs it often doesn’t deliver the results that it should. Why not?

Consistent, Quality Production

Everybody who works in SMB B2B marketing is well aware of this. The agencies, the clients, the consultants,Quality Control 300x225 Content Curation – the Savior of SMB Marketers the gurus… everybody knows it. Smaller businesses just don’t have the resources available to create relevant and useful content on an ongoing basis. They start out with good intentions. They write a few blog posts, get increased traffic and some comments; but the real business payback doesn’t occur until after months of consistently publishing compelling content. Content that people consume because they want to… because there’s value in it.

It takes time, skill and energy to produce all that content. What if you don’t have the time, skill or energy?

Content Curation

I define content curation as the process of assembling, summarizing and adding commentary to information from multiple sources in a context that is relevant to a particular audience. I think this discipline is essential to content/social media marketing.

Today, we are drowning in information. Most of it is poor quality and of little value (i.e. not worth the time spent to consume it). There is tremendous value in sifting through the mountains of content to find those rare golden nuggets that are high quality, relevant, useful and (hopefully) entertaining. With the ever increasing volume of information we’re faced with, businesses can bring real value to their prospects and clients by serving as a filter.

Marketers can build trust by providing focused curation in areas that matter to their prospects and clients. Quality original content has always had value, but curation is coming to have nearly equal value. The key is to stake out unique topic areas. For SMB B2Bs, those are the areas that are of professional interest to the buyers of your products and services.

The information you curate should help your target audience make better buying decisions; and it should increase the benefits of using your products and services. It might include economic or regulatory news that affects their industry, and other adjacent but relevant topics. Your aim is to become the most trusted source in those areas. You don’t need a lot of time or money to do this. You just need to have a deep understanding of your chosen niche.

In this post I told you the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of content curation for SMB B2Bs. In our next post, I’ll discuss how to do all the above effectively and efficiently.

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Posted in acSellerant, Bob Leonard, business to business, content marketing, content/social media marketing, digital relationships, execution, social media, trust | 1 Comment »

Helping B2Bs Execute Social Media

Tuesday, February 15th, 2011

Content Strategy Provides a Social Media Roadmap

Successful execution of social media programs is an issue for SMB B2Bs, but it can be done. Post Four in our series is Content Strategy. This is timely in that I’m doing just that – developing a Information Structure 300x225 Helping B2Bs Execute Social Mediacontent strategy and a blog post (editorial) calendar for a client this week. They didn’t understand the need for this step. I convinced them that what seems like an additional task will actually save significant time and effort over the long run. It is SO MUCH easier to come up with useful and relevant content each week when you’ve taken the time to map it out up front.

Development of a content strategy plays a key role in successful execution of a social media program. Whether you communicate to your audience via a blog, Twitter or social networking sites like LinkedIn, the only true way to build relationships with a growing network is to listen, engage and provide content they find valuable.

Capturing insight about your audience in a social media context can be accomplished through:

  • Participation in appropriate online discussion groups,
  • Social media monitoring tools, and
  • Surveys and polls.

If the objective for your social media efforts is to sell more products and services, become a resource to help your audience make smart buying choices regarding configuration and integration. Give them information re how to leverage your products and services in ways that will make them heroes in their companies. Give them information that’s relevant and useful to them in their business. Over time your knowledge and tools will help them accomplish their goals and, in turn, they’ll see your company as a valuable resource.

In this age of Web 2.0, those who are active in social media are essentially publishers. Content creation plays a key role in your social media strategy. One way to ensure you publish consistent, unique content that:

  1. speaks compellingly to your target audience,
  2. extends and amplifies your marketing messaging, and
  3. aligns with your target keyword concepts;

is to create an editorial calendar. Social media publishing platforms like blogs can use content schedules (aka editorial calendars) to serve as a guide and keep messaging aligned with your overall content strategy.

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Posted in acSellerant, Bob Leonard, business to business, content marketing, digital relationships, execution, social media | 1 Comment »

Make Social Media Easier with Target Personas

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011
Diverse Group of Business People 300x149 Make Social Media Easier with Target Personas

Different Content for Different People

This is the third in a series of blog posts where I deconstruct the social media marketing process in order to solve the content development problem. The number one cause of social media marketing failure is poor and/or inconsistent content development. This is especially acute for small to mid-sized B2B companies. Why? Because…

  1. SMB B2Bs don’t have the resources that large companies have to do the requisite content development.
  2. B2Bs sell complex products and services to professional business people; so their content must be concise, compelling, relevant, useful and (hopefully) entertaining – not an easy task.

You can’t create compelling content if you don’t have a clear idea of who you’re communicating with. What’s relevant and useful to one person is irrelevant and useless to the next. Target personas should include current customers, as well as prospects. I develop one persona for both customers and prospects. If you have more than one type of product or service, you should create a persona for each product line (and probably a different corporate voice and SM profile for each too).

You Want More of Your Best

If you haven’t created a clear profile of your most desirable prospects, this process can help you do that:

Take a look at your list of current customers. Which are your most profitable? Which are the most fun to do business with? (It’s always interesting to see the overlap between these.) Put this subset of customers into a spreadsheet and score them on a list of demographics (age, location, industry, role/title, size of business, etc.) and psychographics (attitudes, beliefs, values, personality type, buying motives, etc.).

Let’s say, for example, you determine that your prime prospect has the following attributes:

  • lives in the Midwest
  • is between 35 and 55 years old
  • works in a small (10 to 50 employee) credit union or community bank
  • is the COO, VP, (person in charge) of Operations
  • is male
  • is married and has school age children
  • is active in his community
  • and makes buying decisions based on how they might affect his career.

You now have a good idea of who your best target is, what his interests and concerns are, and how you can motivate him. Some people even name their primary persona (I named mine ‘Erica’). Print out this list of attributes and tack it up where you can read it from your desk chair. Before writing a blog post, or tweeting, or contributing to a LinkedIn discussion, review that list to remind yourself who you’re conversing with. It makes the process much easier. Try it and see.

Please let me know if you have any other targeting tips that help you in developing content, or if you decide to try this process, let me know how it works for you.

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Posted in acSellerant, Bob Leonard, business to business, content marketing, digital relationships, execution, social media, trust | 6 Comments »

User-Generated Content via Market Research

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011

This is the third post in a series devoted to a pervasive problem experienced by SMB B2B companies. That problem is successful execution of their social media strategies. The best social media strategy on the planet is worthless if it isn’t implemented. The most difficult piece to execute for SMBs is the development of an ongoing stream of relevant and useful content. Poor quality content is cheap and easy to generate, but it does more harm than good.

In my last post, Getting Over the Social Media Content Hump, I listed all the ingredients of a successful social media campaign (that I could think of at the time). My intention is to take each of them – one per week – and delve deeper in an attempt to answer, “How can this facet of social media be leveraged to help develop and/or distribute quality, highly readable content.”

This week’s topic is Market Research.

Social media is a great tool for market research. You can research your clients and your competition, and improve your products and services via crowd sourced surveys. Knowing what your prospects and clients are saying, as well as what your competition is up to, is highly valuable in itself. Anticipating and validating product changes through social research, polls and surveys can be of extreme value. And these polls and surveys will also develop user-generated content.

Business Strategy Chart 300x199 User Generated Content via Market Research

This is a tactic that market research firms (e.g. Forrester, Frost & Sullivan, Gartner) have been using for decades. It’s no small task to develop a survey questionnaire that elicits valuable information, but there are consultants who specialize in this.

Can’t afford a consultant? Send an email around to your department heads: C-suite, Customer Service, Engineering, HR, Marketing, Product Management, Sales; and ask them for two or three market-related questions that each would love to have the answers to.

Then place these surveys on relevant sites like Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Twitter, and industry specific networking sites. The answers will give you a treasure trove of information that is, by definition, relevant and useful. The information came directly from your target audience!

Use this user-generated content to feed your blogs, group discussions, tweets, etc. And take another sheet from the research firms’ playbook – every year (or quarter, or month) update and re-post your polls and surveys. You’ll get more fodder for your content needs, and more up to date insight into the needs and wants of your clients and target market.

Beneficial side effects may include tighter alignment between your social media people and the rest of the company (and a new found respect for what social media can accomplish), and a closer digital relationship with customers and prospects. This blog post by Scott Frangos makes a crucial distinction between content and true connection (the kind needed to close high ticket B2B deals).

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Posted in acSellerant, Bob Leonard, business to business, content marketing, digital relationships, execution, market research, marketing strategy, new product launch, social media, trust | 2 Comments »

How to Get Over the Social Media Content Hump

Tuesday, January 11th, 2011

I wrote a blog post a week ago that obviously touched a nerve. “B2B Social Media’s Big Not So Secret” garnered the most traffic of any blog post I’ve ever written. David Meerman Scott tweeted the post – that certainly goosed my traffic. I also received a few comments and a flurry of phone calls and emails. 99% of the feedback was supportive of my premise, which was:

“Small to medium sized B2B companies are not realizing the benefits they should from social media marketing due to problems with execution.”

OK. Fine. I have agreement on the above premise. So what? How does that help the companies affected? Well, admitting to the problem is always the first step, isn’t it?

I’m going to devote the next several blogs to this topic. I think I have some helpful hints for the client companies, and the agencies and consultants working with them. I by no means have all the answers, though. So I invite all to comment with any insights you’ve garnered.

Here’s my editorial content list for this series of posts:

  1. Research – the good news is that social media enables ‘lurking and listening’. It’s easy to find and listen in on the relevant conversations that are occurring. The bad news is that this is time consuming. The conversations evolve and you need to keep up to date. Ideally all stakeholders will have their ears and eyes on the appropriate conversations. A (formal or informal) back channel needs to be established for information sharing.
  2. Involving client personnel in the process. This is a biggie. They’re busy people, and they’re crucial to the success of any content marketing or social media endeavor. They need to understand this (the best way is for the CEO to make it a priority). I specifically target sales people because they know what questions prospects need answered, what objections need to be overcome, and the competitive land mines that need to be defused.
  3. Development of target personas. You can’t create compelling content if you don’t have a clear idea of who you’re speaking to. What’s relevant and useful to one person is irrelevant and useless to the next. Target personas should include current customers, and targeted bloggers/media/PR types in addition to prospects.
  4. Determine your content strategy and who is responsible for executing each task. Include an editorial calendar, deadlines, information sources, etc.
  5. Messaging – what specifically do you want to communicate to each target type, and what do you want them to do (what constitutes a ‘conversion’)?
  6. Include distribution, outreach and socialization… the mechanics of how you’ll get your quality content in front of your target audience.
  7. Develop a feedback loop. We’re back to listening here. Track blog comments and reply to them when appropriate. See who retweets or mentions your content in discussions. Make it somebody’s job to document and enter into the CRM system (there are tools available to automate this process).
  8. Budget accordingly. Social media is an extremely cost effective marketing tool, but it isn’t free or even cheap. Understand that it requires a significant investment of time. Ensure that the people assigned are sharp and experienced enough to make this a successful endeavor.

Please let me know if I missed anything (I’m sure I have). We’ll take one topic at a time and within a couple of months, we should have a blueprint to follow to ensure our carefully developed social media strategies are executed successfully.

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Posted in acSellerant, Bob Leonard, business to business, content marketing, digital relationships, execution, marketing strategy, Sales and Marketing alliance, sales enablement, social media, trust | 7 Comments »

B2B Social Media’s Dirty, Big Not-So-Secret

Tuesday, January 4th, 2011

Everybody knows what to do and how to do it. If you don’t, there are dozens of good books on the subject, and hundreds of consultants and gurus (some excellent, others not so much). We know social media marketing is extremely effective, yet (for SMBs at least) it isn’t delivering the results that it should. Why not?

EXECUTION!

Everybody who works in SMB B2B marketing is well aware of this. The agencies, the consultants, the gurus… even the clients know it. From the client side they tell me, “Everybody wants to be a strategist. They come in and set up our blog, develop our content strategy, launch our company profiles on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and then they go away.”Ghostown4blog 300x220 B2B Social Medias Dirty, Big Not So Secret

What I hear from my fellow marketing professionals is, “The clients won’t invest in the process. Nobody on the inside ‘owns’ social media marketing, so it doesn’t get done. They asked me to develop the content on an ongoing basis, but I can make much more money (and have more fun) developing strategy.”

I’ve worked with three clients so far who came to the same solution; and at first, I thought it was a good idea. They all said, “Let’s find a recent college grad. The kids all understand this social media stuff, and there’s tons of them looking for a job.” Three times tried, and three times failed. Why? The kids do understand the platforms, and the peer to peer communications in a social context. They’re too young to understand business. They don’t know how to have a nuanced sales conversation with a seasoned business person. And they don’t have the industry (for my clients, that’s IT) experience. I’m sure there are exceptions to the rule, but those young men and women won’t work for $15 an hour even in this economy.

So what do we do? Perceptions are changing. The social media gurus are beginning to understand that the land grab is over. It’s time to start homesteading. Less blue sky strategizing (and sky high consulting fees) and more day to day work (which can still be fun and rewarding). There will also be less frustration over perfectly good strategies going to waste due to a lack of execution.

On the client side, people are finally internalizing the message that marketing (including social media) is a PROCESS. It has to be worked on every day. The ROI of social media marketing is mind boggling when compared to print and broadcast advertising. Clients are beginning to understand that they have to (whether by hiring full time personnel, or subcontracting to outside vendors) pay professionals a professional rate.

I think 2011 is the year that businesses get past this social media marketing stumbling block. At least the winners will. If you want to learn more about what acSellerant does in this space, please visit our landing page about ghost blogging. We have similar services for all types of online and offline content development.

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Posted in acSellerant, business to business, digital relationships, execution, marketing strategy, social media | 7 Comments »

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