In this interview, Matthew Peake shares MiCassa’s bootstrapped mission to change the way people communicate with their building community. He also shares the marketing and business lessons learned as MiCassa charts the next move from start-up to a wide audience.

MiCassa’s app allows building residents to upload and share important building files, communicate with other residents, book common areas, receive updates, and stay informed about key building issues.

The app is free for 60 days. And you can download it here.

As a start-up, what’s been your biggest marketing challenge?

The challenge is reaching a wide usership. Multiplying the traction.

We are dealing with the strata—an environment that people are really emotionally charged up about. But, at the same time, don’t really want to think about too much.

That said, we think MiCassa can really help building residents. Your strata is such an important part of your life’s biggest financial investment, your living environment, and your relation with the people who share your building.

Building residents have an amazing amount of perspective—from the little old lady down the hall to young couple. Our app helps to open up more discussions. This can reduce mistakes, and to give them a sense that they belong to something bigger than just a box.

We think that makes a better place to live and a better building to invest in.

How do you approach product development?

We are seeing resident’s needs evolve—and fundamentally, our product is a community-driven application (including the development of features which we tailor to pain-points raised by buildings we work with). We are a small company and can’t afford to build solutions and features that may or may not be used—this makes our product development very responsive to buildings—and our new features come directly from the community.

An example is our new common booking area calendar feature. A building in Vancouver that uses MiCassa was having trouble organizing their common area bookings. They sent us a request. We developed it—and now it’s a popular feature.

How have you used social media in your marketing?

Our goal with social media is to use it to personalize the company. We want people to become confident they can talk with us. We want them to collaborate with feature requests.

For us, the more they communicate with technology, the more they will see how the app can help them in their strata.

We preach a transparent, engaged, collaborative community—social media helps us to bring that MiCassa brand promise to life.

What’s next for MiCasa?

Build amazing functional tools for our customers, put one foot in front of the other, and just grow our business.

We never stop developing. It is constantly being updated and ungraded. We release upgrades once or twice per week. There’s no room to stop moving as a start-up.

We are still young company and the next step is to navigate the business from a scaling perspective.

But we are excited for growth—and it is really rewarding to see our mission working. We have begun to see more and more people interacting on our Facebook page, sharing strata advice, and using technology to create better-connected places to live. I wake up excited every day.

Live in a building? Tell your council about MiCassa here.

Other Relevant Articles:

Online PR Strategies for Tech Start-ups

Our Tech Client Gets Acquired By Groupon

Four Innovative Start-Ups on Vancouver Island

Beating the Big Brands with Social Media

You can get the full video sessions of the conference here. And don’t forget to download GetStoried’s Believe Me: A Storytelling Manifesto for Change-Makers and Innovators—one of the most insightful and valuable eBooks about storytelling and marketing out there. It’s free, by the way.

These tips were all captured from the live sessions.

Storytelling and Business Communications

1) The job of the story in business is not to organize information, but to make the deal repeatable . . . You need people to take the story and repeat it outside of the sales meeting . . . Stories do this by creating tension . . .which sustains interest and attention to your idea. Oren Klaff, author of Pitch Anything, www.intersectioncapital.com

2) Often missing from people’s [business] stories is the key idea of introducing the stakes and context…help people locate themselves in the story . . . show them how this is relevant to them.  Michael Margolis, GetStoried.com

3) If you are going to lead, if you are going to be successful, everyone is going to have to learn [how to tell their story]. Because if they don’t, if they want to be dinosaurs and stick with the old ‘I don’t share myself and I don’t talk about myself in business communications’—I think those people are on a sinking ship, and they know it. Bo Eason, www.starlightrunner.com

Image by the talented Emily Marko www.emilymarko.com

4) For those in the business of communications—those hired to tell other’s people ‘s stories—you really have to learn, and witness, and embody your own story before you can truly help others tell theirs.  Michael Margolis

Business Story Archetypes

5) Setting, person, struggle, resolution. This is the basic story flow of most stories.  Rohit Bhargava, http://likeonomics.com/

6) There are five business story archetypes you need to learn to tell:

• The Passionate Enthusiast (example, Moleskin Journals);
• The Inspired Inventor (example, Dyson Vacuum cleaners);
• The Smart Listener (example, Stacy Pita Chips);
• The Likeable Hero (example, Sal Khan, who built an online empire by teaching people complex subjects such as mathematics with online tutorials, named in Time Magazine’s 2012 100 Most Influential People);
• The Little Guy Versus the Big Guy (example, Kevin Plank of Under Armour taking on Nike).

Rohit Bhargava, from his book Personality Not Included

7) Myth and archetype are the building blocks of narrative and story. Jeff Gomez, www.starlightrunner.com

Storytelling and Credibility

9) The most untrustworthy people are the people we don’t know their motivations or intentions. We question them. We say, why is this person doing this? This makes it hard to trust another person unless we know where they are coming from. Storytelling—by showing vulnerability and humanity—can help with transparency—and that then serves as the place of connection with your audience. Michael Margolis, GetStoried.com

10) If you have a customer who is on the fence about purchasing your product or services, there is nothing as effective as a customer story to push them to act. Gartner Analyst Quote via Casey Hibbard’s Session

11) If a picture is worth a thousands words, then a story is worth a thousand assurances. Via @TheStoryFactor

Using Storytelling for B2B Marketing

12) Make your customer stories reflect and match the customer considering your product. The audience should see themselves in the story. This can be done by featuring a similar industry, a similar size business, or location. Or match it to the customer’s challenge and show how the story solved it.  Casey Hibbard, www.storiesthatsellguide.com

13) [Winning business] is not only a financial transaction, it is a social transaction … you can’t control the financial transaction until you get control of the social environment. Who is going to do a deal with you if they don’t like you, don’t trust you, and don’t believe in you, and aren’t willing to follow you?  Oren Klaff, author of Pitch Anything, www.intersectioncapital.com

Storytelling and Branding

14) Marketers are interested in elevator speeches—what your brand does, how you are different. These can be useful, but most of these are brag and boast statements. [A brand story] can be much more meaningful because it is value and belief based. Jim Signorelli, author of StoryBranding: Creating Stand Out Brands Through the Power of Story, www.eswpartners.com

15) If you have a birth certificate, you have a brand. Jim Signorelli

16) When dialogue is introduced, it weakens control of the message. Jeff Gomez

On Uncovering Stories to Tell

17) Go into the part you don’t want to talk about. What is the section of your life that you least want us to see? That’s the gold . . . That’s your [unique storytelling] calling card [. . .] Bo Eason

18) The more personal your story, the more universal it becomes. Write and act on the specific stories that give your life its greatest meaning and fulfillment. It may not seem like it is relevant to the world . . . yet it is the very specifics of your life (the smells, the tastes, the sounds)—in the full glory of its messiness—that is universal to all.  Bo Eason

19) It’s really hard to make an emotional connection with a feature or function. Jim Signorelli

Image by the talented Emily Marko www.emilymarko.com

20) Start at your very lowest moment . . . the moment where you looked around and you thought it was over. You had nowhere to go. Then show the decision you made to fight, rather than run . . . A battle to fight—that’s a story. Bo Eason

21) People are looking for themselves in you—in a world that tells us to be strong, people appreciate you revealing your weakness because it gives them hope. Kahlil Ashanti, www.kahlilashanti.com

22) Try to perceive the world as a series of questions. Robert Tercek, www.robertercek.com

Using Stories to Persuade

23) The more information you deliver, the more people will trust you and feel comfortable—and the more people trust us and feel comfortable with us, then the chances are higher we can influence them to accept our ideas. Storytelling, controlling the frame, can help hold attention and deliver information by using narrative arcs and tension. Oren Klaff

Storytelling that Reaches a Wide Audience

24) Our team is trusted because we don’t impose your story on you. We take your story and magnify it.  Jeff Gomez

25) Generosity equals income potential . . . Think of the greatest people you know, the greatest athletes and occupations you admire the most: whoever gets paid the most gives the most of themselves to that particular sport, or occupation, or art form.  Bo Eason

Image by the talented Emily Marko www.emilymarko.com

26) Engage people you would not normally reach on an emotional level by incorporating them into the mythology. Jeff Gomez

27) What I’ve found is that the more open and honest I am about my self and my personal story, just being who I am in real life, the more I can connect with my audience and the bigger it grows. Corbett Barr, www.corbettbarr.com

Using Storytelling in Business Blogging

28) For your business blog, you need to have your ideal customer avatar. Or have one person in your mind that you always write for—and that person is a composite of the ideal market, the people you want to serve. Marie Forleo, author of Make Every Man Want You: How To Be So Irresistible You’ll Barely Keep From Dating Yourself, http://marieforleo.com/

29) Every time I’ve pushed the boundary I’ve found a bigger audience waiting for me. Corbett Barr

Use Stories To Win Pitches

30) Pitching is an attention problem—all the information you provide a person enters their brain through the most primitive part of their brain, the crocodile brain [the brainstem]–and the crocodile brain filters information in a very, very simple way: if it is not novel, ignore it. If it is not visual, ignore it. If it is not related to movement, ignore it. If it is not dangerous, sexual, food, ignore it . . . the way to solve the attention problem is to make it simple, very high contrast. Provide very clear context, never seem needy like you are going to take their resources, and make it fast and visual. This gets you through the defenses of the crocodile brain to the neocortex, the higher brain.  Oren Klaff, author of Pitch Anything

31) The crocodile brain is interested in survival—if your pitch looks like it is going to use up resources, it ignores it. Oren Klaff

32) Our brain is designed to take in visual information much faster than auditory information—make your pitch fast and visual. Oren Klaff

Narrative Meaning

33) Every thought we think is creating our future. Robert Tercek, www.robertercek.com

34) People are looking for themselves in you—in a world that tells us to be strong, people appreciate you revealing your weakness because it gives them hope. Kahlil Ashanti, www.kahlilashanti.com

35) One of the basic building blocks of story structure is: start with a want or a need, and then write us into what you are willing to do to get there and what it means to you. The audience then can buy in emotionally and join you on that journey. Kahlil Ashanti

Get the Full Sessions

You can still purchase access to all of the videos from GetStoried.com’s Reinvention Summit 2 here.

And please share your own tips below, including any you picked up from the Summit.

For more digital marketing strategies and free resources, follow One Net Marketing on Twitter.

Illustrated images are credited to the talented Emily Marko. View more of her visual work and hire her for infographics and other visual work at www.emilymarko.com.

Last month, one of our clients co-sponsored a conference. We gave them some tips for making the most out of their social media presence while at the conference and thought we’d share some of the tips on our blog.

This article covers using Twitter, Facebook, and hash-tags at conferences, how to use your blog at a conference, and our one principle for making sure that people come to your booth.

Using Conference Hash-tags and Finding Influencers

#1 Look in the program the night before and follow speakers with Twitter accounts. Also, add speakers to a “list” to your Twitter account.

#2 Create a second list for attendees of the conference (add attendees from the designated conference hash-tag stream in your down-time).

Photo Credit: Kris Krug

#3 Use appropriate event hash-tags based on the content you are tweeting (use the party hash-tags for party announcements and so on). You can typically find these hash-tags on the official conference website.

Presentations and Creating Content

#5 During presentations, try to catch the sound bytes that you would be jotting down as notes from session talks. The first person to post a good speaker quote is often heavily re-tweeted. Get your tweeting hands ready!

#6 Make sure if you quote someone you “@” them. Twitter celebrities and prominent speakers are very vain interested about the buzz around their talk. They will be paying attention to the “@” mentions around their content. This is a good chance to catch their eye and make a connection.

#7 Ask thoughtful questions through Twitter that others in the room can respond to.

Photo Credit: Kris Krug

#8 RT others and “@” other comments as much as possible. 60% of what you tweet should be focused at someone specific. Don’t just barf up hash-tags.

#9 Copywriter Tip: if you want to cover the presentation and turn it into a blog post, a great tactic is to write the post as they speak, rather than trying to capture notes. The reason is the speaker has spent many hours organizing the structure of his or her points. S0–if you follow along and write as the presentation is going, you will end with a logical set of points already assembled into the best possible order. This saves time later as you won’t have to turn your raw notes into a coherent argument.

Photos and Conference Events

#10 Take lots of photos (they get re-tweeted way more often) but don’t be lazy. Get up close, frame up a good shot, and make sure it tells a story. My favourite event photographer is Kris Krug. He loves to shoot with his iphone as well as professional shots. Take a look at his even photography to get an idea of what to shoot: KK Flickr. Or hire him for your next conference.

Photo Credit: Kris Krug

#11 Often times the best stuff that is tweeted is through good conversations outside of the conference room alongside candid photos.

#12 Grab a few shots of awesome conference swag, notes left on note boards around the conference, and people decked out in corporate wear (or mascots).

Photo Credit: Kris Krug

#13 Posting a quick iPhone /iPad interview to YouTube and then tweeting it, is never a bad thing. Just make sure when you do it, make sure the room you film it in is quiet! People can handle shaky cams, but not bad audio!

Covering the Conference on Your Blog

#13 Once the day is finished, compile your best material into a blog post (do this every night as time does matter on whether or not your posts are successful). The beauty of blogging is that your coverage of the conference does not have to be high art. Just share what you learned in a very informal way.

#14 Write a few top 10 X of the day or theme based blog posts with a little humour (short and to the point). These get the most traction at conferences. Don’t write too much! Also include photos.

Photo Credit: Kris Krug

#15 Once the conference is over, go through your Tweets, search through the conference hash-tags, find other posts on the conference, and write a really good round-up of the conference. This blog post should be much more detailed and polished. After you have published it, share it with all the connections and influencers you met at the conference. Make sure you email or Tweet the conference speakers you mention in the post. This leg-work will result in a well-shared post. Consider offering this post to a trade publication for them to publish. Just make sure you are timely as conferences become old news fast.

Social Media Distribution

Send most of your content through Twitter with roughly 15% ending up on your Facebook page, 5% of content into short recap blog posts. Remember to put some Facebook only /Blog only content out there as well. Each channel is different and unique content (per channel) is always great!

Twitter

• Tweet quotable speaker quotes, party announcements, trivia and occasional photos (use Instagram for photos).
• Co-ordinate meet-ups and introduce people.
• Be helpful, useful, candid.
• 60% of your tweets should be aimed at someone specifically (@).
• Try a game/quiz or easy competition through Twitter.

Facebook

• Add a nice photo of the crowd or a candid shot of the speaker and the best quote or lesson learned from one specific session. (try to @ the speaker /company in FB if possible).
• Add a good party pic to Facebook via Instagram (not where everyone is hammered, but a glam “fun” shot). Tag people in the shot.
• Add a few photos of your booth to Facebook with staff having a good time.
• Showcase your staff at a team dinner / event outside the conference.
• Do not exceed 3 or 4 posts per day on Facebook (and make sure they are spread out and different styles ie. photo, blog post, quote, question).

Company Blog

• Take your best photos and top speaker summary, or day highlights and put them into a blog post. (Daily Recap).
• Use the Top 5 or 10 X of the day… format. (Very popular and tweetable).
• Make sure to tweet each post and add 1 blog post (only 1) to Facebook per day (max).
• Make sure to get your blog posts up in a timely fashion (if they aren’t up quick, they are worthless less effective).

Getting People to Your Booth

Social media can definitely help to get people to your booth. But we also recommend that you think about how to integrate social media into your conference display.

Our best advice? Make it fun. And make it ‘social-by-design,’ which means building social sharing right into the concept.

For example, last year One Net Marketing created an interactive photo-booth for Victoria’s annual Social Media Camp. We provided attendees with props and removable social media symbols made out of plastic that people could stick on their clothing and take photos with three different poses.

We then had a script that automatically updated these photos with hash-tags in real-time to a website we built just for the conference. The photos were then sent to all of the person’s social media profiles from Twitter to Facebook.

The site also dynamically generated a profile page for each participant, capturing their interests, a few hash-tags, and where to find them online. Users could then download the photo-strip and print them out. You can view the fun little site at Flashyourgadgets.com.

The result? Tons of attention. A flurry of re-tweets, traffic spikes, and a bunch of conference attendees around our booth having a great time.

And—to brag—compared with all the other boring booths filled with business cards and posters, our booth did all the work for us, attracting visitors and created a nice integration between social media (people love to share photos of themselves) and our offline marketing. We had people coming to our booth till the very last second (even when we were quite tired and ready to shut it all down).

It was also covered in various conference write-ups. So–make it fun. People will love you for it and reward you with attention.

That’s all the tips we have.

But…if you’d like to book the FlashYourGadgets Photo Booth and bring some geeky fun your event please contact Nicole@onenetmarketing.com.

Photo Credits for Conference Shots by Kris Krug: KK+.

Using search engines to generate sales and leads is often seen as a direct response medium. Targeting high-level keywords takes considerable time, money, and talent, and a shorter route is to chase the keywords that will more quickly convert into a lead or sale.

So–”best affiliate marketing software” would be a profitable target, one that signals a high buying intent, and “what is affiliate marketing?” would be seen as a general term, probably used by someone quite a long distance away from that final sales call.

But, as Richard Baxter, said at the 2011 London Conversion Conference, “the battle to convert people on a website into buyers starts with getting coverage, and this is SEO’s job.”

In other words, search and social media are becoming much more than driving traffic to your website. They also involve “owning the SERPS,” which means increasing the places a prospective buyer finds mentions of your brand and products online.

Image credit: Brafton News

As Michael McVeigh, from Strategic ServicesZeta Interactive, mentioned recently to eMarketer, “Search is very much part of the connective tissue of digital media.”

He pointed out that search goes beyond “finding things”: it is also about digital branding, creating an entire profile online that extends beyond your own website or Facebook page.

For example, prospective buyers will search to see if other customers are happy with your products, what the media thinks of you, and whether you have influence in the industry.

As Dylan (our fearless Marketing Director and Co-Founder) mentioned in a recent post on B2B lead nurturing, effective B2B marketing targets buyers across multiple stages of their research with the goal of shaping their decision criteria along the way.

This involves making “content production, keyword research, and social media activity align with the long-term process of research, evaluation, and decision.”

So how to do this exactly? It comes down to “owning the real-estate” around your main keywords.

Not just the keywords that you want to rank on–the ones that are directly related to your product offerings–but also the keywords that cover all stages of what our client Impact Radius calls the “customer journey”: the multi-stage and often multi-channeled path that customers move through, going from initial awareness to interest in your products to evaluation and finally conversion.

Because search is so important, things like SEM and SEO should not be overlooked for branding. It’s always been about getting greater real estate on the search engine results page and guarding against someone from advertising on their branded term. They [top-performing digital brands] now understand the importance of owning their own brand again in the space.

That’s the theory. Now here is how LinkedIn in particular can help you claim some of that digital real-estate and to make your company visible to both motivated buyers as well as those future buyers trying to orientate themselves in the marketplace.

LinkedIn and SEO

So SEO is about increasing the places people find your brand and product online. As you know, with B2B marketing the research process is very diligent and getting coverage in the search results involves more than just increasing the rank and traffic to your own website. This is because the buyer doesn’t just want to choose the top result in the search results. They also want to evaluate the competition, to see what the industry thinks, and to make sure they are making a safe, smart choice.

Image credit: Brafton News

With LinkedIn now boasting over 75 million professional members, including an executive from every fortune 500 company, it is an obvious resource for reaching the professional market. Further, LinkedIn has demonstrated to be the most effective lead generation social media tool, generating a visitor-to-lead conversion rate of 2.74%, almost three times higher than Twitter and Facebook.

Given these impressive metrics, businesses need to leverage LinkedIn as a viable web traffic source through search engine optimization (SEO), to drive LinkedIn’s qualified traffic onto their own sites to increase their own conversions. Fortunately, LinkedIn has features baked-in that search engines love, including groups and answers.

Why LinkedIn answers is easy B2B real-estate to claim

LinkedIn answers is a resource for professionals to post questions and have them answered by the community. The most powerful SEO tool built into this feature is the ability to add a ‘web resource’ in your responses, thereby allowing you to link back to your website.

Simply put, this allows you to mine LinkedIn questions for questions related to your industry, provide an answer, then supplement your response with a link to a resource on your own site, including a tutorial, whitepaper download page etc.

By responding to LinkedIn questions you will be increasing your own search engine visibility. As Google loves mixing the results on their pages (blogs, forum topics, video and images all appear on the results page) you can expect your LinkedIn answers to be indexed. If your answers are niche enough they could potentially make the first page on Google.

For example, note the position of the LinkedIn answer page when Googling the phrase “what is a universal container tag?” This phrase is related to enterprise level marketing analytic known as “attribution reporting.”

As shown above, the top two results are from two community forums–LinkedIn and Quora.com, an answer forum. 

This is a top of funnel search that would be done by new buyers to a market. It isn’t a high-converting term. It’s an entry path. And for that reason, it’s an excellent place to capture that prospective buyer right when they begin learning the terminology of your industry.

LinkedIn Groups

In LinkedIn, you can search groups by selecting ‘groups’ from the drop down in the search bar, and from there find groups themed around your specific product/service/industry.

When on a group page, you will notice on their ‘discussion’ box a blue link reading ‘attach a link’. This is your opportunity to link back to a relevant page on your own site that is germane to the group’s content, while starting or responding to group discussions.

This is a pretty intuitive way to get your links out. Another SEO strategy is to mine the content of a group for keyword ideas. This allows you to do your own qualitative SEO keyword research by finding out what words professionals are actually using to talk about your product/service/industry, and use these words to fuel your own SEO campaigns.

Those are just a few examples of the easy SEO and branding wins for B2B tech companies ready for you to claim in LinkedIn.

If you found value in this article, we’d really appreciate you hitting one of those social sharing icons at the top.

For more B2B content marketing strategy, in-bound research, and free advice follow us on Twitter (@OneNetMarketing).

Image sources: Brafton News Infographic on SEO

Related Resources:

The Three Essential Components of a Lead Nurturing Program

Nine Cost-Effective Ways to Accelerate B2B Lead Generation

Online PR Strategies for Tech Start-Ups

B2B Lead Nurturing in Four Easy Steps

Boost Your Website’s Traffic With These Juicy, Easy, Links

Forrester defines lead nurturing having three central components:

1. a sustained relationship
2. a coordinated and structured process
3. the exchange of relevant and valuable insight for increasing intimacy and influence.

Let’s walk through each of these points.

1. A sustained relationship

In Forrester’s Q1 2011 North American B2B Technology Marketing Tactics And Benchmarks Online Survey, they found that all of the top performers had a nurturing program. Nearly 10% of the worst performers reported that they did not nurture leads at all.

Top performers also reported a more committed approach to nurturing. While 82% of top performers reported that it took four or more nurturing interactions to mature a lead to sales qualified status, only 74% of the worst performers reported using four or more touches. Nearly one-third (32%) of the top performers reported seven or more touches versus 26% for worst performers.

Forrester also found that top performers realized improved performance at all stages of the L2RM cycle. Conversion ratios for top performers were at least 4 percentage points higher through the major stages of the L2RM process: lead origination, lead nurturing, and sales conversion.

A sustained relationship means that you are reaching buyers early in their research and shaping their perceptions and buying criteria over the course of the process.

2. A coordinated and structured process

Too many tech marketers believe that “nurturing” is the same as sending random content down the marketing automation pipe. Or reaching out to a pool of customers on a regular basis to “touch base.”

The goal should not be to simply to put your company in front of them, reach out a few times, and then either close or move on. Instead, your content production, keyword research, and social media activity should align with the long-term process of research, evaluation, and decision.

Does your lead nurturing program help the customer learn how to buy?

This means that you are targeting buyers across multiple stages of their research, shaping their decision criteria along the way.

3. The exchange of relevant and valuable insight for increasing intimacy and influence

Content marketing is about education. As Copyblogger often says, “education is selling,” which is to say education persuades and leads someone forward, earning their trust, permission, and respect.  Once you have that framework in place, closing the sale is much easier.

One of the basic truths of marketing is that credibility sells. In B2C, credibility is important, but often flies under the radar. For example, a website selling iPads is piggybacking on the credibility of Apple and so, can get away with a sloppy website design and little market leadership (get away with it–not thrive).

In B2B, building trust is everything. Buyers need to believe you can fulfill the product promises you make. And this takes more than witty copy on the homepage. This is why compelling content is so essential. You are trading excellent content for the buyer coming to know, like, and trust you.

Thinking about the overall strategy will help you see the bigger principles behind the trend toward content and in-bound marketing. Blogging is not about just getting traffic to your website. It is about attracting the right type of customer and keeping them interested with the right type of content.

A lead nurturing checklist for B2B tech marketers

Tech marketers who want to build a lead-nurturing program should make sure that their efforts align with the following:

• Does your program help the customer learn how to buy? Lead nurturing isn’t about hard selling. It’s about persuasion. It’s about leading and developing, shaping and influencing.
• Is it personal? The reason why buyers don’t pick up the phone or respond to your email blast is that it these types of tactics are indirect and unsolicited. Downloading a whitepaper is not enough of an introduction to want to talk to your sales force next week. And sending a few blog posts to your email list, isn’t enough to build trust and intimacy.
• Do you write content for the different stages of the buying cycle? What is the strategy behind every piece of content? What is the persuasive architecture of your lead nurturing program? What are the different stages you are targeting and how is your content helping to move the buyer through those different phases?
• Are you delivering through your buyer’s preferred channels? In the Forrester survey, a notable mismatch was that tech vendors listed webinars ad their second-most popular tactic. And tech buyers listed webinars as their eight-most popular information source.
• Do you have a system? Forrester’s survey showed that top performers have a nurturing program. Nearly 10% of the worst performers reported that they did not nurture leads at all.Do you know what works? It is important track how visitors discover your company—and study the most successful entry pages, as well as the path customers take through different kinds of content before buying.

For more in-bound marketing advice, digital trends, and B2B lead generation research, follow us on Twitter (@Onenetmarketing).

Related Resources

Lead Nurturing in Four Easy Steps

Nine Cost Effective Ways to Boost B2B Lead Generation

Power to the People: Understanding the Digital Shift in Buying Preferences

Forrester’s Q1 2011 North American B2B Technology Marketing Tactics And Benchmarks Online Survey

The deal was reported yesterday in TechCrunch. And today, the news hit media like the Toronto Star, the Financial Post, Search Engine Land, TechVibes, and Econsultancy. The disclosed amount was 20 million.

The deal involves an “acqhire” with the Uptake team moving down into Groupon’s Palo Alto office.

Uptake uses personalized social data to help users research their trips. And it’s this deep focus on aggregating content created by users relevant to you—not just  content from hotels, travel sites, or random reviews—that has made it shine in the travel space. Yen Lee, the CEO of Uptake (also Canadian) and the rest of the Uptake team have  been onto something big for years: hyper-local social travel advice.

Uptake has been one of the clients we couldn’t wait to collaborate with, especially in person.  The team is so passionate about what they do, have always been iterative in their development approach and the team has worked incredibly hard.  Walking into their office One Net  always felt like a part of family – almost instantly.  Yen Lee is an inspiration to our agency; he knows how to lead a team, has a clear vision of what he wants and also empowers his employees and contractors to explore new ideas. And… he is Canadian (Vancouver) to boot eh!  We are extremely proud of Yen and the rest of the team – hard work really does pay off!

One Net Marketing designed Uptake’s previous homepage, developed a social media strategy for them, and worked on internal social media integration ideation.

Already millions of people enjoy Uptake (in terms of traffic Uptake is just behind TripAdvisor  and Yahoo Travel) and now, they will be helping Groupon move further into a super social travel space.

“It’s great to be out of the SEO cloud,” Uptake’s CEO Yen Lee told us today. “Our strategic initiative into the social space, tapping into the crowd wisdom of travellers, is a great extension on our original vision and foundation.”

A major congratulations to the Uptake team! We can’t wait to see what Groupon and Uptake have for planned for travellers in the near future.

More about Uptake—making travel advice social

Deep social integration is what drives Uptake.  While most travel review sites offer user generated reviews and tips, Uptake’s focus is on more relevant and personalized advice.

This sounds simple, but the technology is complex and involves Uptake’s patent-pending ‘destination mining’ technology. This technology allows the site to analyze a ton of user content from location data (such as hometowns and check-ins), implicit location data, photos, status updates, and comments.

The result? You don’t need to scan through mountains of user reviews. Instead, you’ll get some relevant advice about a new destination from the people you care about.

To see Uptake in action, click here. Here’s a case study of some work One Net Marketing did for Uptake (halfway down the page).

For more digital marketing advice and news, connect with us on Twitter (@OneNetMarketing).

When it comes to accelerating lead generation for B2B, digital inbound marketing channels lead the way. According to research from inbound marketing solutions provider HubSpot, businesses dominated by inbound marketing have a 62% lower cost per lead than firms that do mostly outbound marketing. In fact, as Hubspot research shows that . . .

• 78% of Internet users conduct product research online.
• 57% of businesses have acquired a customer through their company blog.
• Companies that blog get 55% more web traffic.
• Inbound marketing costs 62% less per lead than traditional, outbound marketing. The average outbound lead costs $373. The average inbound lead costs $143.

Data above from Hubspot’s State of Inbound Marketing Report. See also this post.

With that data in mind, here are some cost-effective ways to accelerate your lead generation.

#1 Begin with what is

Without a doubt, the fastest way to accelerate lead generation is to stop turning away your customers at the door. A high bounce rate (which refers to whether visitors view more than one page on your site) is a clear signal that customers are discrediting your company as a solution before they even really investigate your products. This should not be fixed by trying to increase traffic. Instead, plug the leaks before you do anything else.

For example, we (One Net Marketing) recently helped one of our clients, a B2B software company, reduce their bounce rate from 79.28% to 3.39%.

Given that bounce rate is defined as “the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page” our client went from having ~20% of visitors stick around to ~95%.  In other words, we increased prospective customers for our client by nearly 5x — without creating a single blog post or spending budget on advertising.

Why do people leave your site? It’s simple. And it is related to one of the most essential, holy, and ironclad principles behind Google’s search engine algorithms:

“The perfect search engine would understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want.” – Google’s Co-founder and CEO, Larry Page.

Visitors only leave if they perceive your site doesn’t have what they are looking for. The secret to generating leads via search engine marketing is to deliver what your customers are searching for. It is a data-based skill, framing your product within the context of a visitor’s demand and expectations.

So the solution could be fixing a UI design flaw or simply correcting poor copywriting on your homepage. Keep testing until you locate the cause and fix it.

#2 Don’t guess what your customer’s want

The reason why customers leave your site could simply be that your positioning and sales copy simply doesn’t resonate with them. Launch a small PPC campaign and test different value propositions.

Every time we launch a PPC campaign, we are surprised with what actually resonates with the audience—versus the sales message we think will perform the best. That’s why inbound marketing channels are amazing—instant response and data to help make big decisions.

#3 Long-tail SEO and lead generation

Long-tail SEO refers to targeting multiple word search queries rather than the short phrases (so “carbon auditing software for manufacturing plant Canada” rather than “carbon audit”). Long-tail SEO produces leads much faster than a comprehensive SEO campaign.

The downside, of course, is that these terms do not bring a lot of traffic. The upside is that these terms often signal high buying intent and you can surgically target the types of clients you want to attract.

Construct some blog posts with “long-tail” keyword targets. If your company is finding it hard to gain traction online, these posts will also help you later as you chase more competitive keywords.

#4 Harness the power of online PR

Everyone has the power to be a publisher online. And that means you don’t need to go through a slow-moving traditional PR firm to get your company’s name in front of potential clients. Here is an article we wrote on some quick and effective online PR strategies for tech companies.

#5 Don’t ignore the middle of the funnel

Lead generation requires turning strangers (your web traffic) into people willing to talk to you. The problem is that many B2B companies rush from awareness to the sales pitch. You read our 200 word blog post! Now, sign-up for a telephone call! This rarely works.

A more effective way to capture more leads is put energy into the middle of the funnel. Research reports, e-books, free product trials, webinar sign-ups—these things do really work to generate and nurture leads, build trust, and warm customers up to the next level.

The simplest way to do this is to have some of your blog posts sending traffic to a landing page. And then, after the visitor has made it through that gate, you can begin to suggest a free consultation.

Here is a post on lead nurturing to help you with the middle of the funnel.

#6 Increase your sign-ups

Like bounce rate, the easiest and fastest way to generate more leads is to optimize your sign-up forms. Here is a post all about optimizing sign-up forms.

#7 Create a ton of content

According to Hubspot, blogs with 24-51 posts will generate a median of 13 leads. However, when your posted articles get above the 52 article mark, your blog will generate a median of 23 leads. This is a 77% lead growth, more than twice than the 30% lead growth that occurs when your article number reaches the 24 post mark.

Task your team to create content. The reason why more content is better is simply due to the nature of the B2B buying research prospect: the more topics in your industry you cover, the more times a prospect is going to encounter your brand in the search results. And, as a result, the more credibility your brand is going to gain in the eyes of the searcher.

If you want to be a “leading provider” then you need to show up in those search results . . . everywhere. Leaders lead. And in B2B, that means you need accelerate content creation.

#8 Don’t create crap

But rather than create a bunch of shallow content, ask yourself—why am I creating this? What is the strategy behind this blog post? If the strategy is to create 52 blog posts so that you can accelerate lead generation, then you are confusing cause and effect.

Content is about building trust. It is also about introducing your company as a credible solution to their problems.

The secret?

Focus on using your content to help your ideal customer overcome the barriers of purchasing from your company. What is preventing them from buying from your company?

Typically, there are three reasons:

• They don’t know your company exists, which means you need to get them to your website.
• They don’t believe that your product will solve their problems, which means you need to establish credibility and make them believe in your product’s promise.
• They aren’t sure that your product is the best one to buy, which leads them to leave, searching for other competitors.

To accelerate leads, begin creating content that answers those three objections.

#9 Taking visitors deeper into your site increases lead generation

While most of your visitors will only read one blog post and bolt, a small number will move deeper into your site.

That is why more content is better. You have more bait to lead people deeper, helping them to trust you and to feel confident that your products or services are the answer to their questions.

So end every blog post with a link to more content. By the way, Old Sport, could we interest you in any of these posts?

• Lead Nurturing in Four Easy Steps
• Generate Awareness of Your Company with Online PR
• Help Your Customers Find Your Website With These Easy Wins
• Beat the Big Brands and Generate Leads With Social Media
  

As always, feel free to post your thoughts and comments — especially if your have your own B2B lead generation success stories to share.

Today, the One Net Marketing Team headed down to Tectoria to find the coolest, forward-thinking web-based companies hiding in our Island backyard.

This is a live blog from the exhibitor floor. Here, in no particular order, are some awesome, innovative Victoria companies you should definitely check-out.

#1 The company: Chatterblock

What they do: ChatterBlock is a hyper-local social media site, helping to connect parents with local community resources and opportunities. You can find, for example, a ballet class with a local Victoria instructor or KinderGym for your toddler at the Juan de Fuca Recreation Centre. Nice site and a great idea.

Why we like them: When I was young, my parents made me do chores when I hung around the house complaining of summer boredom. Fast-forward to the future. ChatterBlock is showing Victorians that there is always something fun and social going on in this town. The site isn’t only useful and fun to use, but they are also helping promote a lot of great local businesses, services, and community events. And they get your kids out of the house which is cool too.

ChatterBlock

The digital marketer says: Hyper-local web businesses like ChatterBlock are where it is at! Over the past few years, the digital marketing industry has seen the power of combining the reach of social networks with local, physical communities. Watch for more innovative companies like ChatterBlock, showing the power of the global web gone local.

#2 The company: SendtoNews

What they do: SendtoNews is an internet-based service that helps connect content creators and media, helping to get news-worthy stories into news rooms without the traditional slow, expensive PR agency. Upload your story, images, audio, or videos. And SendtoNews helps to optimize your content, making sure your content has a high chance of being picked up by major media stations. This is next-generation PR.

Why we like them: Two reasons. First, they offer a performance-pricing model. As digital marketers, we appreciate stuff like that. Second, our agency often does online PR for start-ups and they don’t have deep budgets to get their message out there. Companies like SendtoNews are making it easier for even small companies to get the coverage they deserve.

The digital marketer says: This company is going to explode. Viral campaigns and content marketing have all shown that awesome content spins around the globe. And traditional PR methods are just too slow to keep up with the web. This technology gives everyone an equal chance at having their story told. . . fast. Plus, you can upload a news-story from your iPhone. From your iPhone! (As seen below).

SendtoNews

#3 The company: Terapeak

What they do: Terapeak helps eBay sellers make a ton of money, giving them sophisticated analytics, optimization advice, and cool market research tools such as competitor analysis, profitable trends, and reports to find the most profitable eBay product niches.

Why we like them: As a digital marketing agency, we obviously love analytics, custom reporting, conversion optimization, and advanced market research tools. And Terapeak’s software is filled with advanced tools and really intelligent analysis software. Especially, the profitable trend research tool.

TeraPeak

The digital marketer says: Tools rule! If you really want to sell online, you need to understand and test different pricing, analyze your competitors, and capitalize on trends. Companies like Terapeak are showing that smart data and actionable insights are what really drives the bottom line.

#4 The Company: PixTON

What they do: Ever wanted to be a comic-book artist? With PixTON, you can create amazing, colourful, and professional looking comic book characters, scenes, and stories with innovative click-n-drag website. From characters, props, speech bubbles, and dynamic backgrounds. This is a seriously cool website.

Why we like them: It was always my dream to be a comic book artist. But even with an artist Father, drawing just wasn’t in my future. With PixTON, anyone can create comic books. Pretty fun stuff.

PixTON

The digital marketer says: A good product is the best marketing. With PixTON, the product is amazing and highly sharable. You put this in front of eyeballs with the Google Display Network or a Facebook campaign and it’s hard not to imagine someone wanting to try it out.

Did we miss anyone? Tweet us.

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Luckily, the age of traditional PR is declining. And this is, in part, due to the way fresh content is organized, spread, and distributed online.

Consider Google Fresh and PubSubHubBub—two new technologies that are making it easier and faster for smaller sites to get their content in front of users—and giving nimble little companies an easy way to get their products in the news without going through the traditional PR route.

Google likes your content fresh

This month, Google announced a new algorithm update designed to push relevant and recent content to the top of the results. This new update impacts a whopping 35% of searches.

As Amit Singhal posted on the official Google blog,

“Search results, like warm cookies right out of the oven or cool refreshing fruit on a hot summer’s day, are best when they’re fresh. Even if you don’t specify it in your search, you probably want search results that are relevant and recent.”

Bottom line: Google is looking for fresh, new content. And you don’t need to be a major publisher to get your news to the top results. Focus on delivering quality news types of content–stories that users will share and link to–and you can get inexpensive awareness and exposure for not much effort.

After all, PR is about putting your company in the news. Getting eyeballs and sharing your story. SEO combined with online PR is a perfect way to organically push your content to the top of Google. It might not have the prestige or insane traffic spike of a Wall Street Journal mention–but it also won’t cost you thousands of PR dollars.

Plus, the more forward-thinking media outlets like the Huffington Post look for fresh viral content. If your news story attracts a lot of views then it makes an easier article pitch to the traditional media outlet.

Publish a bunch of new crap?

Nope. Google has made clear that when it says 35% of all content will be fresh that means that in the top ten Google results, there will be a mix between ‘evergreen content’ and new, fresh updates.

In the past, SEO was a huge mountain because the top results were claimed by sites with thousands of backlinks, high PR (PageRank), and ancient, trusted domains.

But now, look what opportunity just opened:

As shown above, Google is blending “classic content” (as in posts that probably have a ton of links pointing to them and a trusted source like Wired.com) and recent posts.

If you are a new company looking for media awareness, then looking for some gaps in recency in the top results might bring some fast, instant, and inexpensive coverage.

Meet PubSubHubBub–the future of ‘push’ content

Google began as a dream: index the millions and millions of pages online. This involved sending out ‘web crawlers’ to find, sort, and classify content for users. But as the internet’s appetite for new content is boundless, the challenge has always been a matter of keeping up with all of the fresh content.

Even back in Google’s early days, the traditional indexing work-flow of crawlers going to servers and scanning them for new content was a laborious process. And the downside of this, for smaller sites, is that the crawlers are often slower to arrive

But recently PubSubHubBub, a simple protocol extension that currently works with Atom and RSS Url feeds, asked a simple question: what if publishers told servers and search bots when they had new content? That way, indexing technology and servers would have to work less–and users would get their new content faster.

PubSubHubBub is a genius little innovation. And it shows a glimpse of the future of indexing. Images, videos, and all content on the web is going to be real-time.

It’s clear that Google’s current goal is less about building a vast library as it is building a caffeinated cloud of interesting, relevant, things, answers, stories, and bursts of shared attention.

Need help gaining some online PR awareness for your start-up?

One Net Marketing helps start-ups launch products and accelerate their leads and sales using digital marketing channels.

Read about other tech companies we have helped.

So our short answer is that, as business owners, Facebook doesn’t really like us. They laugh at the thought of market research, and don’t really put much thought into the tools they provide to businesses to market themselves.

And if we had to choose, Google’s Business Profile (sometimes called Google Places) is a much better choice for creating a company profile online. Here’s why.

Hello Mother . . . Would you like to like my Page?

Unlike Google Places, which makes your business visible to thousands of potential customers on Google and other major search engines, Facebook offers you two initial ways to get customers: spam your family / friends or buy ads. We can live with that, though. Your customers eventually come and with a ton of hard work, you build up an audience.

But it still is annoying. A well-visited Facebook page can take years to build. And even brands with multi-million dollar TV campaigns designed to drive traffic to their Facebook page still struggle to gain traction. Even worse 95% of people who like your Facebook page will never return to view it again! Sure you might get through to their message stream for a while but trust us – that doesn’t usually last long. See our detailed post on Facebook’s edge score to learn why.

So where’s my branded Facebook Page?

Oh, you don’t get a branded page just yet. You need a certain amount of ‘likes’ before you qualify for a vanity URL. Till then, you are: http://www.facebook.com/pages/COOLBeansCoffeeShop/134439376659704?skip_nax_wizard=true

Has a nice ring it to, doesn’t it? I’m sure your customers will remember this URL string when they see it in newspaper ad. Don’t worry.  It will change.  Everything changes in Facebook land. Remember Fans? Beacon? FBML?

OK, no URL. So where do you access your page after you have created it. Seriously, where do you log into your Facebook page?

It’s there, that tiny mark at the bottom of the page. How could you miss it? The other option of course is to navigate to your page indirectly from your profile. Seems logical, right? I think not.

Google helps people find your business in their search engine. Facebook helps you . . .

Spam your friends!

Well, it’s not that bad if you promote your page on your website and actively build an audience. But out of the gate, Google’s business profile kills the meager promotion Facebook gives you.

For example, check out the free promotion Google gives you for your business profile versus Facebook (see below).

Google is built for businesses. Facebook is not.

This is because Google understands the sales process. It knows that people search for businesses online and that they need things to help them evaluate your business: reviews, photos, hours of operation, location.

You can, of course, build a Facebook Places page. But when it comes to maps, and hitting the top of the search results—Google isn’t going to let its competitor beat them.

So why does Facebook make it so hard?

Mostly because Facebook isn’t very business savvy. They don’t really know how people are supposed to be using their platform for business (other than—we have access to data!) and haven’t really given much thought to the role Facebook is playing in business. Let’s not forget that only three years ago, Zuckerburg said that he’d iron out a business model within three years. (Music to his investor’s ears, who gave him $240 million a few years prior). It wasn’t until 2009, and 300 million users, that the company first turned a profit.

The bottom line? Facebook doesn’t really care about your bottom line. They are the Bob Dylan of social media platforms: they love to do their own thing, even if it means consistently disappointing their fans and confusing businesses. Zuckerburg is focused on building his company and being the social architect of the future. Helping you sell mochas and muffins at your local coffee shop—boring! But he will synthesize your business hours and updates into a real-time social sharing story timeline! Neato!

If Zuckerburg put half the amount of brainpower into improving the usability for businesses that he did for timeline we’d be singing a different tune. Instead Zukcerburg and his 10,000 developers are creating 45 different timeline views so you can hear when your friends yell “Jersday!”.  One might argue that appeasing average Joe user is what made Facebook so successful in the first place; however, business is social and Facebook needs to do a better job integrating consumer experiences with the overall user experience.  And preferably not through an app. We have Yelp for this! Maybe then, they would give Google a run for their money.

Here’s a link to create a Google Places for Business page.

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