In a lot of industries, when you say social media, people automatically think Facebook and Twitter—sites known around the world as some of the most popular, effective ways of engaging with prospects. But for B2B businesses, from custom food packaging companies to the makers of a particle counter, it’s LinkedIn that is the real winner—the network whose users are mostly business professionals with a business mindset, where it’s easy to keep potential clients informed and where there’s great potential for attracting leads.

How can you make the most of LinkedIn for your B2B company?

Here are 25 tips to help you get the most out of it:

1. Create a company account: In addition to your personal account, set up an account for your company on LinkedIn and connect with existing business associates and clients to establish a network of people who already know your brand and its products or services.
2. Optimize your headline: Write your headline to emphasize the value you offer clients.
3. Use keywords in your company description: Incorporate keywords into the description of your company on your LinkedIn page.
4. Include your logo: Strengthen your brand by unifying your profile with your other marketing tools, including by using your logo front and center.
5. Create a custom URL: LinkedIn gives you the ability to create a custom URL—optimize yours to include your brand name.
6. Share your URL everywhere: Once you’ve established a custom URL, use it on all your marketing materials, from brochures to emails to your website.
7. Build connections: Make sure all your employees are part of your company’s network on LinkedIn, and reach out to your existing contacts and customers to build your network with people who already know your company, its products and services.
8. Make new connections: With LinkedIn Groups, you’re able to message other members even if you aren’t personally connected to them—take advantage of these connections in order to build your network.
9. Ask for introductions: When you think it could benefit your business, ask your contacts for introductions to their contacts.
10. Search: Through LinkedIn’s search feature, you can locate people (by industry, location, job title) and gain information about your industry.
11. Make honest recommendations: Giving valuable recommendations not only benefits your contacts, but it also shows you have a spirit of goodwill and makes you seem trustworthy.
12. Ask for recommendations: Having quality recommendations give a profile credibility with users and may help attract new leads for your business.
13. Answer questions: Establish yourself as a leader in the field by answering questions that are relevant to your field.
14. Ask questions: Just as answering a question can help establish you as thought leader, asking questions can engage prospects and expose more people to your company.
15. Post status updates: Show your contacts that you’re active on LinkedIn by updating your status regularly—weekly if you wish to be included on LinkedIn’s update emails—and integrate important keywords.
16. Make the most of links: Your LinkedIn profile will allow up to three links—use them to point to valuable sites with names that maximize SEO value.
17. Link to your blog: Link to your company’s blog on your profile to increase its exposure, as well as to give contacts more info about your brand.
18. Integrate with Twitter: Link up with your company’s Twitter account to maximize the power of your social reach.
19. Join existing LinkedIn groups: Join the groups that are most relevant to your company’s services or products so you can keep up with what’s being said.
20. Participate in groups: Post regularly in LinkedIn Groups with comments and responses, and post links because members will be likely to click through.
21. Use groups to encourage blog commentary: Post links to your blog posts in groups, and ask questions that will encourage commentary on what you’ve written.
22. Respond to messages: Set up your notifications so that you’ll receive newsletters in your email inbox, and respond right away.
23. Use polls: Polls allow you to conduct market research with your LinkedIn network—then share results with your contacts.
24. Advertise: LinkedIn offers paid advertising that can be targeted to the specific audience you choose—with perimeters able to be set based on geography, groups, job titles, gender, age, etc.—and conversion rates have been shown to be 122% higher than those on Google.
25. Keep things current: As with any social media effort, it’s of vital importance that you keep information up-to-date. Let prospects see that you’re active on LinkedIn in order to encourage interaction.

What do you think? What ways have you used LinkedIn to boost your B2B?

For many B2Bs, Twitter is a mystery. Sure, it makes sense for restaurants and retail shops, but where is the value for makers of safety hand gloves or fire resistant clothing? When you primarily market to businesses, is Twitter really a valuable asset?

The truth is, Twitter can be a powerful marketing tool for B2Bs—at least when it’s done right. All it takes is a little creativity.

Here are 25 ideas to help you get the most out of your B2B Twitter presence!

OVERALL STRATEGY & PLANNING

1. Establish goals: What is your reason for using Twitter? To promote your business as a leader in the industry? To ask questions? To generate new leads? Knowing why you’re on Twitter will help you establish an actionable plan for meeting those goals.
2. Dedicate resources: Twitter thrives on regular updates and constant communication, so it’s important that you have the time and resources to devote to its regular upkeep. If you’re going to enter this network, plan to put at least part of each day into reading and posting Tweets.
3. Have a plan: Decide on how frequently you want to update. Some accounts are posting constantly; others a few times a week. Whatever you decide, aim to be posting at least a few times a day, even if that means pre-scheduling your Tweets through an online service.
4. Share responsibility: One way to lighten the burden of keeping up with your Twitter account is to spread responsibility among several employees. Make multiple employees users of the account and you’ll expand your content, style and amount of conversations.
5. Encourage employees to Tweet: Strengthen the power of your Twitter account by encouraging employees to share news about the company from their personal Twitter accounts as well. This will expand your reach and enhance your brand messaging.

YOUR TWITTER ACCOUNT

1. Use a relevant handle: Whether you make your handle your business name or a variation on it, be sure to choose something that will strengthen your brand and make it easy for followers to identify your company.
2. Work keywords into your Twitter bio: Make it easy for other Twitter users to find you by working up to three keywords specific to your industry in your bio.
3. Be willing to learn: Twitter is about more than promoting your business—it’s also a great place to learn from experts in marketing, social media and your specific industry.
4. Find and follow industry leaders: Through directories, lists, other users, etc., follow major players in your industry and interact with them.
5. Find and follow key news sources: Whatever your industry’s news sources, publications and associations, find them on Twitter to stay up-to-date on the latest info, as well as to have quality information to share with your followers.
6. Use lists: Organize your followers through Twitter lists so it’s easier to keep track of what’s being said. This essentially gives you multiple streams you can access from your account.

CONTENT

1. Have a consistent voice: Whether you have one employee posting Tweets or several, be sure to employ one consistent voice across all posts.
2. Provide interesting content: Post information your audience will find helpful, from statistics to news to stories.
3. Filter yourself: Before posting anything on Twitter, ask yourself why anyone would care to know about it, and filter out what is empty, filler content.
4. Promote others: Share content from people and blogs that will provide real value to your audience and build relationships with those you promote.
5. Add commentary: Retweets are good, but rewteets with your added commentary are even better because then you’re adding to the conversation.
6. Ask questions: Look for ways to build engagement and interaction through Tweets that promote conversation—such as direct questions that ask for responses from followers.
7. Post links to company blog posts: Help your followers stay updated with your blog by posting links to new entries.
8. Tweet special offers: It’s important that followers see you as more than self-promoting, which is why you should share interesting info and promote other users, but that doesn’t mean you can never promote your company. Tweeting special offers will give users another reason to follow you and bring in new leads for your business.
9. Focus on quality over quantity: Don’t worry about reading every single post in your Twitter stream or about posting hundreds of times a day—when using Twitter for business, it’s more important to focus on quality over quantity. Post when you have something to say and read the posts you can, responding to what interests you.

TECHNICALITIES

1. Monitor your brand through Twitter search: Through Twitter search, you can monitor conversations about your brand, as well as mentions of important keywords.
2. Use URL shorteners: URL shorteners give you more back for your buck in the Twittersphere, shortening links to leave more space for content in your 140 characters.
3. Use analytics: Experiment with the timing of your Tweets so you can know if certain times of day bring in more clicks, retweets and responses. Analytics may indicate your company should share early in the day or late in the week to pull in the most users.
4. Don’t overuse hashtags: Hashtags are designed to organize Tweets in a way that makes it simple for users to find what’s been posted about a given topic—giving you a way to expand your influence beyond your followers. But don’t go overboard or you could lose the followers you do have—instead, be intentional about your hashtags and use them purposefully.
5. Set up landing pages: A great way to track your links is through landing pages, set up specifically for users who come to your site through Twitter.

Nobody cares about your product.

So says Jeanne Walters, who is on the board of the Social Media Club of Chicago, has sage advice for businesses looking to capitalize on social media marketing efforts. She says wrap the fancy, shiny new tech toys in old-school marketing techniques which focus on your customers first and you’ll have a winning ROI formula.

“The biggest mistake is when companies set up these beautiful Facebook timelines or Pinterest pages and they don’t ask for any feedback,” Walters said. “It’s basically another form of push marketing and customers on social media hate that. Nobody cares about your product. Customers care about their experience first. If you want to turn social media folks into purchasers then you need to focus on their experience with your brand, not the product or services your offering.”

So how do you engage social networkers into a positive customer experience to earn cold hard cash? It’s not difficult, says Walters. Just depend on some great old-school marketing techniques that successful companies have always used. Here are some of them:

1. Customer Service is now everyone’s department. “The best companies have always thought this way,” says Walters, “but social media amplifies this old-school marketing tactic.”  With social media you can move issues up the chain very quickly and get it resolved and that process is not private but public. You’re not only engaging your current customers but you are showing your potential customers you are dedicated to resolving customer issues.
2. Listen, don’t just talk. “Allow your current customers to participate in the conversation,” Walters said. “This is really attractive to prospective customers. If you’re a tech company, use social media to determine your next product offering. You’re getting real feedback that matters,” says Walter.
3. Focus on Customer Experience. “Zappos.com isn’t selling products,” Walters says, “It’s selling experience.” For example, social media allows customers to avoid inbound call hell in favor of direct response heaven. Don’t underestimate the power a direct connection with customers or potential customers can have on your bottom line.
4. Develop Content Beyond your Product. Create community not product marketing and you’ll see sales roll in. For example, Armstrong Flooring has no sexy stuff in its product. But it created a “My Project,” feature allowing website visitors to create their dream room with images, allowing them to share the virtual rooms on Facebook. It’s an amazing example of creating content around a customer’s passion instead of just focusing on a product.

The best old-school marketing technique you can remember when engaging in social media marketing is that social media is not about products, it’s about your customers. Think about that when you are creating your social media strategy.

Below, here are 25 quick ideas for making your B2B blog succeed!

Overall Guidelines

1. Know your audience: In order to reach your readers, you need to know who they are. Do research on your target audience, either on your own or with the help of an Internet marketing company. Then, write your content to reach those individuals.
2. Have a plan: In order to offer the best content, it’s important to plan ahead. Amy Izzo at Business 2 Community suggests doing this by “plan[ning] out topic ideas for at least a month ahead and hav[ing] a backlog of posts to fill gaps.”
3. Set goals: Why are you blogging? To boost SEO? To connect with customers? To increase traffic or generate leads? When you know your goals, you’re better able to strategize your blogging to accomplish them.
4. Always be on the lookout for topics: For a lot of bloggers, there’s nothing harder than coming up with topics. Prevent this problem by keeping an eye out for topic ideas any time you are interacting with others in your industry, hearing questions from customers, reading Twitter updates from those in your network, etc.

Blog Topics and Content

1. Provide interesting information: Your blog needs to be more than content filler. Make your posts useful by including information that readers will find interesting, whether statistics, stories, topical articles or customer testimonials.
2. Avoid jargon: B2B industries are notorious for being jargon-heavy in their communications. Stay away for highly industry-specific terms and write in a way that can connect with customers.
3. Don’t be overly salesy: Too many B2B blogs make the mistake of creating content that is all about them and reads more like a sales brochure than a blog post. Don’t talk about yourself all the time but rather show readers your knowledge and expertise in the industry.
4. Grab attention at the opening: Try to engage readers in the first few sentences of each blog post with a strong lead that asks a question or points out an interesting statistic or tells a story. The idea is to pull people in to keep reading—don’t bury the lead.
5. Be scannable: Most Web users will skim information on blogs, so one of the best things you can do to appeal to them is make your content scannable. Use headers to break up the blog posts into readable chunks of info.
6. Write in lists: Research shows that readers like blog posts with lists—and so they’re more likely to promote and link to them. What’s more, writing list-style posts (like this one!) are often easier to write, as you have a sort of built-in outline to fill in.
7. Incorporate images: Images make your blog more visually interesting to readers and can amplify your ability to communicate a message.

Tone and Voice

1. Write conversationally: By nature, blogs are informal—usually written in first or second person. Write like a human being, not like a textbook.
2. Write consistently: To be most effective, write with one, solid, consistent, personal voice, one that engages readers and enhances the sense of your brand.
3. Write professionally: Just because it’s a blog doesn’t mean it doesn’t have to be professional. Proofread before publishing and be on the lookout for typos or grammar mistakes.
4. Have an opinion: Don’t just copy and paste other articles. Add your own commentary and perspective to topics in order to draw readership.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

1. Be SEO friendly: By working keywords into blog titles, image alt tags and content, you increase your ability to show up early in search engines when users look for those terms—increasing the traffic that comes to your site.
2. Pay attention to headlines: The titles of your posts matter, both for bringing in readers and for boosting SEO. Write effective headlines by incorporating keywords and communicating benefits to readers.
3. Update often: Search engines like it when blogs post regularly. Keep your content fresh and current to gain the best SEO advantage!
4. Use SEO tools: Choose a blog theme that’s already optimized for SEO and, in softwares like WordPress, add the benefits of plugins like SEO Title Tag. Track stats, whether through Google Analytics or something else to see how your SEO strategy is working.

Teamwork & Networking

1. Ask the readers to do something: A call to action is vital to any online marketing efforts, as it instructs users on what to do. This may be calling your business, leaving a comment, subscribing or something else.
2. Use guest posts: Other people in your company or industry can make excellent guest posters—adding rich content for readers. You may even want to have a certain employee post once a week or month on a certain subject area.
3. Invite reader comments: Invite conversation. Conclude your posts with questions that invite discussion and interaction from your readers, and then, when people do comment, be sure to respond to them.
4. Link to sources: When you quote or pull information from another site, be sure to give credit and link to it. This not only builds your credibility but also can help your search engine rankings and exposure.
5. Take advantage of social media: Promote your blog posts on your company’s social profiles such as Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn in order to expose your content to your audience.
6. Be easy to reach: Your blog is meant to enhance your brand and business—so make it easy for readers to see how to learn more about your company and how to contact you for information. Keep your contact info prominent and easy to find.

If you have any doubts about the trend, consider this data from the Cisco® Visual Networking Index:

• Global mobile data traffic grew 2.3-fold in 2011.
• In 2011, the number of mobile-connected tablets tripled to 34 million.
• By the end of 2012, the number of mobile-connected devices will exceed the number of people on earth.
• Two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2016.

From a marketing perspective, there are several ways B2Bs can start capitalizing on “mobile smartification.” Which of these things are you doing or considering now?

Advertising. With publications like The Wall Street Journal offering slick mobile apps, executives and managers use tablets for news consumption. Trade publications are following suit; both types of mobile content present great advertising opportunities.

Creating Mobile Apps. Traditional web forms are clumsy on mobile devices, whereas apps designed for mobile use create a pleasant user experience and encourage submissions. In addition day-to-day, offline business activities such as processing RFQs can be translated into mobile apps to make them more convenient and efficient.

Designing a Mobile-Friendly Website. Buyers overwhelmingly turn to the Internet for researching and making purchases. A site that is hard-to-use on smartphones and tablets will lose traffic, leads and sales to competitive sites that are mobile-ready.

Developing Visual and Video Content. People have a decided preference for video and images for their mobile content consumption. While a B2B’s videos and slide presentations may have languished on an intranet in years past, today they can be widely viewed – and shared – on mobile devices. Creating engaging images and video delivers customers tremendous value for product research, education, training, installations, troubleshooting … the list goes on and on.

Mobile Search Optimization. People search for information quite differently on small screens. Utilizing optimization techniques for the mobile market improve lead generation and brand awareness.

QR Codes. Quick response (QR) codes are already used in B2B for use in a wide variety of print media, in order to give mobile users a quick way to scan and link to a firm’s web content. For example, a QR graphic scanned on a piece of literature could take the user to a landing page on which they could place an order. Clever marketers can use the codes to inject an element of fun into the work … and get more work out of their content at the same time!

Whether a firm does dentist website designs or glass block bar designs, there are a multitude of ways to harness mobile technology to use in its marketing activities. Of course, even though mobile marketing can be done doesn’t mean it should be done. What’s the business value?

Perhaps the most important value for B2Bs is establishing and maintaining relationships. If we’ve learned anything from B2B marketers, it is that creating a spectacular user experience is the formula for building a successful enterprise – look no further than Amazon and Apple to see a positive demonstration of this. And you don’t have to go too far down the alphabet to find a negative demonstration in Best Buy.

Is your firm going mobile?

A question we get repeatedly from B2Bs that are new to social media marketing is, how much should we budget? There is obviously no single answer, but this post will lay out ideas and guidelines to help you assess what social spend is right for your business.

Minimum Budgeting Requirements

With social media, a large portion of the cost is time.  Setting up a presence on all of the popular social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ — requires minimal fees, if any. However, to build a community, several activities must be done on a regular basis:

• Community building. Connecting with customers, prospects, peers, and potential referrers. This is a daily activity.
• Brand monitoring. Scouring the social networks for mentions of your company and products. Also a daily activity.
• Engagement. Listening to your communities, responding, reaching out with interactive messaging. Another daily activity, best done in real time.
• Content sharing. Writing, publishing, and sometimes scheduling content with links to strategic blog posts and web pages. This can be done on a monthly basis.
• Social network maintenance. Keeping your communities free of spammers, updating content, adding applications, etc. Best done on a weekly or monthly basis.

In order to achieve results, a certain “critical mass” of social media presence is going to be required. For instance, if you have five people in your Facebook community, there’s very little you can accomplish regardless of how brilliant your techniques are. On the other hand, having 500 or 5000 people in your community opens up tremendous possibilities.

What the critical mass is for your business depends on many factors. Here are the questions that will help you zero in on program objectives and milestones:

• How big is your social marketing universe?
• What are your competitors doing?
• What value to you place on a new community member?
• What conversion activities are you offering?
• What is the value of a conversion?
• How much time are you willing to invest to achieve a payback?

No matter how you fill in the answers to these six questions, from a budgetary standpoint, the key is to not underestimate the time required to execute the social media plan. Most companies do this: they determine they will be satisfied with 1000 relevant Twitter followers in six months, and grossly underestimate how much time it will take to actually make it happen.

At minimum, you should be prepared to devote these resources to your social media program:

• A leader: someone who is responsible and accountable for results, and for developing all of the creative inputs.
• A dedicated staffer who is available 20-40 hours a week to execute all of the five activities listed above.
• Programming support to help set up accounts, update templates, install applications and set up/process analytics.

The Impact of Conversion Strategy on Budgeting

• Social media objectives can be “soft” – things like extending brand awareness or establishing thought leadership.

• Social media objectives can be “hard” – things like driving people from your social media pages to landing pages where they can buy products or download white papers.

• Social media objectives can also be – and usually are – mixed: a  combination of soft and hard objectives.

With this in mind, I have good budgeting news and bad budgeting news.

First the good budgeting news:

Making hard conversions part of the social strategy simplifies and clarifies the budgeting process. If you know an order or a lead is worth “x,” it’s easy enough to calculate an ROI on your social spend.  If you generate $100,000 in new business on a $40,000 budget, you’re in good shape; if it’s the other way around, your program needs an overhaul.

But now the bad budgeting news:

A social program that’s all about hard conversions will probably fail. Social media is above all … social. The “soft side” of social marketing – talking about the weather, selflessly helping your community, showing off your expertise in valuable and sharable content, etc. – these are the things that ultimately persuade people to convert.

Because of this it’s a mistake to let a desire for budgeting accuracy or simplicity drive the strategy of a social media program. It may be difficult to establish the ROI of a program’s brand awareness component, but brand awareness is, nevertheless, intrinsically valuable and contributes to the success of more measurable program goals.

Big Picture Budgeting Recommendations

I’ll try to wrap this up with a few suggestions to help the entire budgeting process along, whether it’s just you making the decisions or a large internal team. Our agency, by the way, works with small and midsize B2Bs in challenging industrial niches such as truck GPS tracking systems and knife safety gloves, so we are used to participating in budgeting discussions on a small and large scale.

• A healthy start-up budget for B2B social media program starts at something around $2500 a month. That number is not as big as it may sound if you consider all-in costs for per-hour labor.

• Anticipate a long ramp-up, anywhere from 12 to 24 months. Establishing social media credibility takes time because it is relationship-based. It’s the opposite of PPC advertising, where people are in the market and boom, react to your offer.

Budgeting is essential to social success. Although as I said it shouldn’t drive strategy, budgeting forces discipline. It’s important for your organization to determine very carefully what data to track, how to interpret it, and how to make it visible. Without that accountability, social programs will never continuously improve and pay off.

 Photo credit © Frog 974 - Fotolia.com

If you have brilliant posts gathering dust in the archives, there’s plenty of things you can do to with them to give your marketing a major lift. Here are 10 proven ways to repurpose or remarket valuable blog content. Some options take a great deal of time; others, little more than a few clicks. I’ve included some thoughts at the end to help you determine how much effort is right for you.

1. Publish an e-book. Everybody is publishing e-books these days – but that’s because readers eat them up. A downfall of blogs is the content is scattered. Bundling up like-themed posts in a PDF provides regular and new readers with real convenience.
2. Create downloadable PDFs. If an e-book project is too big, take two or three like-themed posts and reshape them into a downloadable PDF. PDFs also offer convenience, and make excellent calls to action on your blog. Speaking of which …
3. Add calls to action. Any post in the archives that still gets traffic is an underperforming asset without an appealing offer somewhere in the content. Create a compelling offer, insert it in those posts, and monitor conversions.
4. Use excerpts as email hooks. Old blog posts can work hand-in-hand with email campaigns. Include a snippet from one of your top posts in the next email blast, linked to the post. You’re giving subscribers a great reason to visit your site and explore.
5. Schedule social media shares. We re-share our best material on Twitter and Facebook on a regular monthly schedule. These shares almost always attract new readers, retweets, and likes. Don’t overdo it, though, or you may annoy your communities.
6. Attract links. For those truly timeless posts, or ones that have become topical again, you can alert bloggers in the appropriate niche to their existence and politely ask for a mention and backlink. Bloggers are always looking for great content to share with readers.
7. Add a featured posts widget to your sidebar. New and old readers are often eager to explore what you consider your best work. A featured post option draws visitors deeper into your site. Nobody is going to sift through archives looking for your gems.
8. Write best-of posts. A similar idea to the featured post widget, best-of posts give you another way to highlight your world class content. The difference here is, best-of posts can be pushed out through social sharing, whereas widgets are for people already on your site.
9. Submit posts to bookmarking sites. This is something you might have overlooked when you published your post. Bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon can be awesome sources of traffic and new readers; this is definitely a case where late is better than never.
10. Update and republish. Coming up with new topics can be tough. Expanding or updating a proven winner is much easier, so look for opportunities to reshape good, old material into something even better. Just make sure your re-do is unique enough to avoid having Google see it as duplicate content.

There’s always a market for great content, even in specialized B2B niches like glass block designs and car lifts. It often pays real dividends to avoid the “out of sight, out of mind” syndrome with our published content. Consider:

• How much time do you spend marketing new material, versus marketing old material?
• How much traffic do your best archived posts bring in? How much traffic do your most recent posts bring in?

Looking at the numbers may suggest ways to significantly improve your marketing strategy.

Let’s Talk!

What techniques do you use to squeeze all the benefits out of your juiciest posts?

How can you create a blog that seamlessly matches your website? What are the keys to making sure your blog works with your marketing efforts and not against them?

Below, take a look at some of the top warning signs to look out for that show your blog could be undermining your brand!

1. It Looks Different than Your Website.

To enhance your brand, your blog needs to match your website, sales handouts, social media profiles and other materials in terms of style and appearance. This means if your website and logo are predominantly, say, green and blue, you don’t want to have a business blog that’s orange and black. Other factors beyond color to evaluate include font, type of images, organization and layout. Remember you’re trying to create a unified look and feel that make it easy to identify your brand—so as soon as someone looks at your blog, they can easily identify you as the same business from your website or brochure.

2. It Communicates a Different Tone.

It doesn’t matter if it’s in a press release, a direct mail campaign or a social media profile: the way your company communicates with users needs to be in a coherent voice in order to give a strong and unified message. If your blog is written in first person and seems informal, while your other media is strictly academic, you can turn off your readers. So ask yourself: What is your brand’s tone? Formal or informal? Detailed or concise? Informational or instructional? Keep your blog in line with that communication style in order to strengthen your brand.

3. It Lacks Professionalism.

Believe it or not, spelling or grammar errors can seriously affect the credibility of your brand. When a reader sees sloppy mistakes on your blog, it communicates that either you aren’t professional or don’t care that much about your business—and in either case, that makes it hard to take your company seriously. To avoid this problem, you need to read over your content thoroughly and proofread carefully.

4. It’s Not Interesting.

If readers come to your blog and don’t find the information relevant or useful, it can actually work against you more than if you’d never started one. To be effective, your blog needs to engage with customers in a way that’s relatable and that builds relationships.  You can do this by providing interesting content that encourages readers to tune in, comment and get involved. By turning your blog into a valued resource, you can actually strengthen your brand’s impact rather than hurt it.

5. It’s Inauthentic.

Just like in human relationships, the fastest way to turn off your online audience is by being dishonest. If readers get the sense that your blog is spinning the truth, that won’t just speak poorly about your blog but also your entire business. Be authentic in the way you write: speak truthfully about your business qualifications and services, and represent your company for what it is.

6. It’s Never Updated.

For many small to midsized businesses, it seems important to set up a blog but then difficult to maintain it—and the biggest problem with this is that, over time as your blog remains untouched, potential clients come to see the blog as a sign about your company. A lack of follow-through in your blog can communicate a lack of follow-through in other areas—thereby undermining the essence of your brand. If you have a company blog, you need to keep up with it, posting and interacting in a regular manner.

The bottom line is that branding isn’t much different than the rest of life—the greatest benefits come from being consistent. With your blog as with any other marketing strategy, take the time to consider what it will communicate and how best to strengthen your message.

Click here to view the embedded video.

If it is anything like Miller describes it is certainly a step toward eliminating one of the barriers to marketing automation adoption. By going from an unfriendly “IT centric, API driven CRM integration to a one-click, push button integration into Microsoft Dynamics” it does offer the promise of a quick ramp up time and a marketing department centric decision. It will be interesting to see if Marketo continues to move in this direction by developing a more simplified integration with all its CRM partners.

Check out the interview, it a quick five minutes. You also hear Miller’s perspective on why he believes some marketers remain slow to adopt marketing automation and revenue performance management? In a nutshell:

1. “Marketing in general doesn’t have as much power and credibility in organizations that is should.”
2. “Knowledge. Most marketers have yet to truly understand that there is a different way with marketing automation.”

It is not a matter of simply showing buyers how good your product is, it’s about connecting with your buyer so they can solve a problem, improve performance or have the confidence necessary to open their wallet.

Building that differentiation is difficult, especially when you offer a commodity-based product. Here are three tips to help you connect more deeply with buyers.

Have a Voice.

Humans are social animals. Facebook has proven that almost a billion times over. B2B marketing tends to be dry and full of “corporate” speak so we don’t offend anyone. The reality: Corporate speak bores people into apathy and inaction.

Buyers want to hear about you (your company, your products, your employees) in your own words.

Putting your voice, your personality and your employees out front implies that you treat every potential buyer as an individual. You are in effect using every medium like a one-on-one conversation.

37Signals does a great job at writing for individuals. Check out Rackspace as a good example of putting employees out front.

Show the Value.

What’s shocking is that in this day and age when most of us spend more time online than we do in front of a TV and with all the new media tools at our disposal—usually for free, we haven’t really changed how we engage B2B buyers.

We write and write and write, seamlessly to no end. We are great at producing sell sheets, offer sheets, whitepapers, and spec sheets telling prospects how our products work, feel and operate.

But showing buyers how products will affect their world is far more effective and deepens the connection between buyers and sellers.

The great news is this can be done any almost any budget.  While you need to maintain a professional image, you can produce B2B marketing videos, webinars and video demonstrations for virtually free. And if you think you need an actor, think again. Letting your sales people, product managers, executives and founders be your talent improves authenticity. These people know more about your product than anyone else and are generally the most passionate and honest.

You also don’t need much to get started. I use GoToMeeting ($30 a month) and Join Me (free) for live demonstrations and screen sharing sessions with a good HD webcam, like the Logitech C910 (under $100), to record videos and to show my product off. Simply show your screen for websites and powerpoint materials and spin up your webcam so that you can show your physical product and connect eye-to-eye with attendees.

And oh yeah, don’t forget to hit record! Offering your prospects a replay is a great online asset and conversion point for your website and almost just as effective as live demonstrations.

Get Recognized.

Saying your great and your product will change a prospects world is easy…having someone else validate your claims is the best antidote to an unconnected buyer.

There are three different types of third-party validation that are the most effective:

• customer testimonials including case studies
• external analyst assessments
• awards and recognition.

Getting good customer testimonials is easier than you think and an invaluable resource. They show buyers that other people are willing to risk their own brand by standing up for yours. And recording your testimonials (audio or video) is a great way to enhance that connection online. All you have to do is ask. What’s the worst a customer can say? No?

Make asking for testimonials part of your new customer process and account management strategy for existing customers. When it becomes part of your regular routine, you’ll have a testimonial for every type of customer before you know it.

For audio testimonials, I use Google Voice (free) to call and record conversations with customers. If you need to do some audio editing, Audacity (free) is a great open source tool and pretty intuitive. If at all possible, get customers on video! Most cameras and phones have video, so point, shoot and blast it up to You Tube.

Being recognized by industry analysts takes more lead-time depending on your business. Work to establish regular discussions with the people that cover your trade. Large buyers, investors and reporters use analyst reports for expertise and background.

Getting on an analysts calendar is usually easier than getting a report’s. Analysts are paid for quarterly, annual and custom reports so while they don’t publish as often as reports, their validation of your product usually holds more weight.

For a list of analysts covering your industry you can check out http://alltheanalysts.com/ and http://analystdirectory.barbarafrench.net/.

Finally, awards are a great tool to help buyers feel good about your product and company. Lets face it, as consumers we prefer to buy the best product from the best company…not the team that finished second or didn’t even place.

To win awards you have to compete, and by compete, I mean compete. There are plenty of programs and publications that simply take money for awards and reward every nomination. Stay away from these companies, your buyers will see right through these schemes as they scratch beneath the surface.

The BIG Awards and The Stevies are both juried competitions that reward companies for their nominations. Real business people judge nominations, and while there are plenty of categories and industries represented, the results are unbiased and will be held to a higher standard by your prospects.