B2B Marketing Hub

What I want for my birthday from LinkedIn

2013-02-09T12:37:00.003-08:00

I’ve become a big fan of LinkedIn PPC advertising. The CPC is pretty low (especially for the B2B space), and they have been converting at an aggressive rate. Obviously, my landing pages can’t take all the credit. So, clearly, LinkedIn’s targeting and various anonymous algorithms are firing on all cylinders. I just wish that LinkedIn would put together a mobile app for its advertising platform.

Here’s the deal: my market is all over the world. And, when I wake up in the morning, I’d like to get an early sense of whether it will be a good day or not. Decent progress on my campaigns, of course, could make that extra cup of coffee superfluous. Unfortunately, I have to schlep over to my laptop, fire it up and then head over to the LinkedIn advertising platform. That’s just far too much work for me. It would be so much better if I could just pull up my LinkedIn advertising dashboard on my iPhone or Kindle.

So, LinkedIn, please, please, please: give me a mobile app for your advertising platform. To hit my deadline (check the headline), I’ll need it by the first week of March.

Corporate blogging still leads social media marketing

2012-05-08T04:00:00.000-07:00

I love it: for several years, I’ve heard marketing folks proclaim the death of corporate blogging, favoring the likes of Facebook and Twitter. I’ve always thought that was a joke, and apparently, I’m not alone. According to the latest from eMarketer, 91 percent of the social media marketers surveyed are planning to increase their use of corporate blogs this year. YouTube is next at 86 percent, followed by Foursquare (59 percent), SlideShare (50 percent), Flickr (43 percent) and Tumblr (30 percent).

It’s an interesting distribution. SlideShare is a fantastic platform, and Tumblr is obviously hot. I was surprised to see Foursquare make the list, let alone reach such a prominent position. The platform – and the movement around it – strikes me as stale. Flickr came out of nowhere, but I can see it: if you invest some time in your Flickr account and learning how to really use the tool, the benefits are profound.

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Source: eMarketer

Where will you find social media users?

2012-05-07T07:01:00.001-07:00

The first step in social media marketing, of course, is finding the eyeballs! The goal, of course, is to identify, reach and engage with your target market, and to do that, sometimes, you need to cut a path through the waste of large social networks, like Facebook, to find exactly who you’re looking for. Once you find your target market in the social media world, you’ll want to make sure you have their attention for a while.

According to the latest data from eMarketer, this is most likely to happen on Facebook. The largest social network, with more than 900 million monthly active users, leads in average time on site with 405 minutes per visitor. Tumblr is next at 89 minutes – tied with Pinterest. Twitter trails at 21 minutes, with LinkedIn at 17 minutes, MySpace at 8 minutes and Google+ at 3 minutes.

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Source: eMarketer

Corporate blogging: the REAL REASON you need photos

2012-04-30T04:00:00.000-07:00

The importance of visual impact on the web has only increased over the past few years. In fact, it’s skyrocketed. Take a look at The Huffington Post and Business Insider, for example. Both have followed in the footsteps of Nick Denton’s Gawker empire in making photos more prominent and compelling. Many others have followed (I took this approach, for example, with Inside IPO). There’s another reason to use photos, though, and it may be more important than engaging your users. Thanks to the SEO benefits of photos in corporate blogs (and elsewhere), the use of photos can help you attract new visitors from your target market.

Search engines respond well to photos, so including them in every post can boost the SEO value. Here’s what you can do:

1. Include at least one photo in every blog post

2. Name your photos in accordance with your most important (and relevant) keywords

3. Include your keywords in photo alt descriptions (easy to do in a blogging platform like WordPress

Once you’ve started to include photos in your blog posts (religiously), monitor the results in Google Analytics. In particular, look for action on keywords (for traffic from search engines) that aligns with your photos. It shouldn’t take you long to see some lift.

Need some proof? My first post on B2B Marketing Hub was “Split calls to action #FAIL,” and it included a photo of someone doing a split. The photo was named “splits.jpg.” Sure enough, it became (and has remained) one of the site’s most popular posts, in large part because of search engine action on that photo.

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Photo: SashaW via Flickr

Email marketing: keep B2B prospects from getting sick of you

2012-04-26T04:00:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to beat email for B2B marketing: it’s free, it’s targeted and it works. Search engine marketing (e.g., Google AdWords) is getting more expensive by the day, it seems, and Facebook’s ad platform has yet to prove itself. Display advertising often entails lots of visibility for little click-through, even if you are outperforming the market standard. Social media marketing requires a long runway, and the goal usually is to get them from the social environment to another area (like email or a landing page) in order for them to hop into your funnel.

Email marketing is much easier. You are pushing to a controlled population – your house list – so you know exactly who you’re talking to. You can segment based on profiles to improve targeting even more and further minimize waste. And, it doesn’t cost much: you pay for a service, and there are some cheap ones available (like MailChimp). The metrics, of course, are fantastic, as you can see who opened, who clicked, what was clicked and so on. This is a great way to truly understand what’s on the minds of your prospects and clients.

Until email fatigue sets in.

According to a new post on eMarketer, people are getting tired of unwanted digital promotion. In the United States, 66 percent of respondents who think advertising messages are too frequent indicated that they are inclined to “unsubscribe from, ignore or delete promotional messages.” In the UK, this rate is 65 percent. Twenty-eight percent in the United States – and 32 percent in the UK – say this makes them “less likely ever to respond positively to a message from them in the future.”

So, what is an email marketer to do? On the one hand, you need to use email effectively, and you don’t want to miss an opportunity to engage your target market and generate leads. Yet, you don’t want to destroy any hope of future engagement.

The trick is to deliver value with every email. Make it your first priority to inform or educate, with the offer – linked to the value-added messaging – almost playing a secondary role. Generate useful content based on intelligence you gather from past emails and corporate blog post analytics. Your email marketing messages will perform better if you make them inherently valuable. Also, you’re building a case for the recipient to click a link and take advantage of your offer.

Of course, this is not a rigid rule. There are some times when you’ll just want (or need) to pump out something purely promotional – this approach does have its place. If the bulk of your email provides value, however, you’ll be more likely to generate better results from even your promotional messages.

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Source: eMarketer

Facebook Timeline is increasing engagement, but why?

2012-04-25T10:27:00.003-07:00

Since the end of March, I’ve been wondering how the forced transition to Facebook Timeline for brand pages would affect end-user engagement. In my mind, three possibilities stood out: (a) nothing would change, (b) engagement would decrease because of end-user frustration and (c) engagement would increase – either because of a positive reaction to the new format or because they were trying to figure it out.

Intuitively, (a) didn’t make sense to me. A significant change, intended to shake things up (and highlight photos), had to have an impact. So, it came down to (b) or (c). Since people are hooked on Facebook, (c) struck me as the more plausible alternative. And, that seems to be the case.

According to a new eMarketer blog post, citing research by social media measurement company Simply Measured, engagement (as measured by comments and likes) increased 46 percent in the three weeks following the forced migration to Facebook Timeline. Keep in mind, however, that only 15 brand pages were evaluated.

Interestingly, likes are up, but other forms of engagement haven’t followed suit. Simply put, people are liking pages, but they are less likely to interact with specific content. This suggests that it’s been tougher for users to find and respond to posts on walls (and in custom tabs) in this new format.

In the B2B marketing space, which didn’t seem well represented in the studies cited by eMarketer, Facebook Timeline could mean some new opportunities. Sites with more than 10 million fans were hit hardest by the transition, and those with fewer than 1 million fans appear to have benefitted most. Obviously, B2B companies tend to fall into the latter category.

So, the challenge now becomes taking advantage of this new format for communicating with your target market. How can you use Facebook Timeline to communicate more effectively? Here are a few ideas:

It’s all about the visual: photos and imagery may feel like “consumer” marketing opportunities, but if you broaden your thinking, you’ll see the benefits in B2B marketing. For example, highlighting Facebook Timeline posts with charts can grab the attention of your visitors and demonstrate your firm’s data prowess.

Pin your best stuff: you can stick (or “pin”) a post at the top of your Facebook Timeline for up to seven days. Use this to make sure people see original research or a link to a big report or study.

Blog feed versus direct posting: photos pulled in from a blog feed will not be big. So, it makes sense to post charts, for example, separately. You get two bites at the apple, and you’ll make your data-driven visuals easier to find (and engage with).

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Source: eMarketer

Social media marketing: what's a retweet worth?

2012-04-25T04:00:00.000-07:00

I'm tired of hearing about the branding value of Twitter for B2B companies. Tweets always fly at a fast and furious pace, and so many are missed. At the end of the day, one is only worthwhile when it drives someone to the edge of your funnel. So, when you get excited about being retweeted, stop for a second and think about what you're really getting. Watch the video above to learn more.

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Social media marketing: definitely not free

2012-04-24T04:00:00.000-07:00

It can be tempting to look at social media marketing as free. Compared to traditional paid channels, it may feel that way, but there are plenty of hidden costs. Don't let this deter you: rather, be ready for them, and make sure you commit the resources needed to make your social media initiative powerful. Remember: it's not about costs; it's about ROI.

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Corporate blogging: one easy way to get better marketing intelligence

2012-04-23T04:00:00.000-07:00

Please, please, for the love of god and country, use the “more tag.” It’s hard to believe that in this day and age, people are still making this mistake.

The “more” tag – which may have different names on different blogging platforms – is how you put a page break into your post. When you do this, the visitor will be able to see a summary or the first paragraph of your post on your blog’s home page and then have to click a link to read the whole thing. It just takes a click of the mouse to set this up for each post.

So, why should you do it?

1. It drives me nuts when you don’t: okay, this isn’t the best reason for you to change your corporate blogging behavior, but I can’t be alone. I’d rather scan headlines before clicking into what I want to see than scan entire articles to find what I want. And, to that end …

2. It’s easier for readers to see more of your content: for first-time visitors especially, scanning is easier when all they have to do is look at the headlines and first 100 words or so of each of your blog posts. This increases the odds that they’ll find something interesting and click through – the first step to a long-term relationship with your blog and your brand.

3. The intelligence you get is far better: if you run the entirety of each blog post on your blog’s home page, there’s little reason for me to click through, unless the reader decides to poke around and commits to your blog at a much higher level from the start. That’s a lot to ask. When you run the headlines and summaries on your blog’s home page, your readers have to click through to read the whole piece. That click indicates that a particular reader has read a particular post: this is sales intelligence that may speak to pain points or customer intentions. It’s useful. And, you don’t get it if the visitor doesn’t have to click the headline to read more.

4. It just looks nicer: it really does. I know, it’s just my opinion … but I don’t think I’m alone in this.

Here are some examples of what a blog looks like when you use the more tag (or some variation on this concept):

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Photo: shioshvili via Flickr

Corporate blogging: organize your content [VIDEO]

2012-04-20T04:00:00.000-07:00

It can be tough to keep all your content and contributors straight, especially if you run social media marketing for a large organization. An editorial calendar can help. Watch the video above to learn how you can take advantage of this content marketing tool to make your corporate blog easier to manage and more effective in the marketplace.

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EXCLUSIVE: Buddy Media to support Facebook mobile in … [UPDATED]

2012-04-19T14:06:00.002-07:00

If you’re investing in custom Facebook tab platform Buddy Media, the recent Facebook IPO filing probably brought you face to face with a brutal reality: you aren’t getting nearly as much reach as you thought. Back in February, Facebook revealed that it has more than 400 mn mobile users … people who can’t see your custom tabs and apps (from Buddy Media or anyone else) on their mobile devices.

A source tells me that this situation is likely to be resolved soon.

Look for Buddy Media to adapt tabs and apps for Facebook mobile next month, from what I've heard. This is coming ahead of Facebook's support for mobile, which is expected to be launched around its annual f8 conference (in September). Buddy Media users will need to create mobile-optimized versions of their apps, but they'll at least be able to take advantage of Facebook mobile use before Facebook itself extends tabs and apps onto smartphones.

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Photo: Nimbuzz via Flickr

New study: bloggers are actually useful

2012-04-19T09:17:00.001-07:00

Do you reach out to bloggers in your industry as part of your PR program? If not, you’re almost completely alone. According to B2B Marketing, 82 percent of PR pros ‘work with bloggers to create coverage for clients.’ What are the other 18 percent doing? I don’t know, probably pretending to work.

Well, that’s not entirely fair. If you’re among the 18 percent, there’s still a chance you could see bloggers as ‘useful or invaluable,’ according to the DWPub study that B2B Marketing cites. After all, that’s what 98 percent of respondents have to say.

The remaining 2 percent? I have no idea what they’re thinking.

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Source: B2B Marketing

Photo: Roshan Vyas via Flickr

The newest way to do a marketing survey [VIDEO]

2012-04-19T03:30:00.000-07:00

What if you could ask your target market questions and absolutely know they aren't lying? That would be awesome, right? Well, it's no longer a fantasy! Watch the video above to learn how you can use your corporate blog to drive the same results as a marketing survey. Clicks don't lie!

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Twitter: no more blackbird pie

2012-04-18T04:30:00.000-07:00

If you've been around social media marketing for a while, you may remember "Blackbird Pie." Then again, you may not: it never really seemed to catch on. It's a shame; I found Blackbird Pie to be a tasty resource. It offered a way to embed tweets in your blog posts. Instead of having to take a screen shot, crop it and place it in your post, you could use Blackbird Pie to embed a tweet as HTML. Fortunately, Blackbird Pie isn't relevant because Twitter now offers a native tool for it.

So, what can you do with this? It's a great way to highlight positive feedback from your target market on Twitter. Also, you can use it as a second bite at the apple for content you've already published, using the embedded tweet to draw attention to it again. And, of course, this feature can help you accumulate Twitter followers organically via your corporate blog.

And now for the part that's a total drag. It doesn't work with the Blogger platform, so I can't show it to you here. Check out the source link (below) to see it in action.

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Source: Hubspot

Photo: Rosaura Ochoa via Flickr

Corporate blogging: worried about a high bounce rate?

2012-04-18T04:00:00.000-07:00

Every metric matters, right? When you kick off your first corporate blogging initiative, you’re looking at every number you can. Sometimes, it’s to find successes to celebrate, however small they may be. And, you may feel the need to protect yourself from naysayers who are ready to see your program fail – or “help” it along to that unfortunate conclusion. Over the past seven years, one of the stats loved by blog-haters and blog-opponents is bounce rate. For corporate blogs, it may be the least attractive number you show, and fortunately, it tends to be irrelevant.

Why is your bounce rate so high?

A high bounce rate on your corporate blog could happen for a number of reasons. When your site is new, your bounce rate may be low, especially if you go live with a substantial library of content. Every visitor is new at this point, and each will probably poke around for a while to find out what your blog is all about.

Of course, there will be some visitors during this period who respond to an initial surge of curiosity and then find out your blog isn’t relevant to them. These bounces, which are natural, will offset the new visitors who click around for a while.

As your blog matures, your core audience will grow, and these visitors will come back regularly. Unlike their early visits, these will tend to be shorter. Your core readers will already be familiar with your blog, and they are probably visiting to take a look at your newest content. There won’t be as much reason to go deep. Often, these readers will look at one page and move on. This is great news: your high bounce rate is the result of visitor loyalty. And, it’s loyalty in your target market that you ultimately want, not a low bounce rate.

Related to the visit frequency of your core readers, not publishing a lot of content can contribute to a high bounce rate. In fact, publishing a post every day – no small feat for a corporate blog – is not enough to lower your bounce rate. Visitors to your blog who subscribe via RSS or email (or who look for your newest blog posts on Twitter or Facebook) will come daily, for example, and find one new post. There’s rarely a reason to click deeper.

Successful content marketing is another reason for a high bounce rate. You’re doing a great job of attracting new visitors. If you’re doing this aggressively, you’ll naturally wind up with some portion of your traffic that isn’t a fit for your corporate blog. These guys will bounce off right away. They don’t want you, and since they aren’t in your target market, you really don’t want them. This is a side-effect of aggressive online marketing, and it will affect your bounce rate.

When will my bounce rate get better?

Your bounce rate may never actually improve, especially if you’re scouring the web for new visitors from your target market. Again, there’s nothing wrong with this. Focus on the metrics that actually matter to your company, such as the sales and marketing intelligence from web analytics and contributions to your sales funnel. Metrics that feed ROI matter, and bounce rate just isn’t one of them.

As you develop a rich library of content, your bounce rate will go down. SEO will drive traffic to stories published well in the past, bringing in new visitors, some of whom will explore. This will help with your bounce rate. But, the bounce rate improvement itself isn’t the benefit to you. Rather, it’s getting a new visitor to encounter your brand that you should celebrate.

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Photo: Joe Shlabotnick via Flickr

How to get followers for your corporate blog [VIDEO]

2012-04-18T03:30:00.000-07:00

You've built your corporate blog and filled it with content. Now, it's time to promote it! Watch the video above to learn how you can drive targeted traffic to your B2B marketing blog!

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B2B rocks integrated marketing [CHART]

2012-04-17T11:33:00.002-07:00

The B2C guys are lagging behind us, and now we have a chart to prove it! According to eMarketer, B2B marketing departments in the United States “may have a leg up on their B2C counterparts when it comes to integrating marketing communications across channels,” not to mention blending digital and traditional. But, the B2C folks have the lead in social and mobile – probably because it takes longer to make a case for those channels in the B2B world, where we push to the funnel rather than the sale.

In a blog post, eMarketer reveals that 70 percent of B2C marketers strongly agree that integrated marketing is important, compared to only 56 percent of respondents from the B2B world. That said, we’re doing what they’re saying. More than half of B2B marketing departments already say they have “strong alignment” between marketing and business goals, while just under half of B2C marketers have accomplished this. Also, 33 percent of B2B respondents indicate a “greater desire to develop integrated marketing communication plans for every marketing project – compared to only 25 percent among the B2Cs.

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Source: eMarketer

Corporate blogging: second-degree SEO

2012-04-17T10:51:00.002-07:00

Building up authority with search engines is no small task. It will take some time, and until then, you’ll be fighting for every pageview you can get. Of course, it all pays off in the end, when your long-tail content spikes in value, and traffic comes rolling in. You don’t want to wait, though, and I don’t blame you. So, let’s take a quick look at a way to effectively get the results of SEO in the near term while actually building a strong foundation for the future. You need to start syndicating your content.

About content syndication

Content syndication, in the corporate blogging world, is part PR and part content marketing. You want to produce content that will be relevant for other sites – and you want it to resonate with your target market among their visitors. At the same time, you need to make the case to other sites that your content is worth carrying. In the end, you’re content will be published in multiple places, hopefully on sites that get more traffic … and you get more bang for your buck.

Give it away

It may seem nuts to give your content away. After all, why would someone come to your site? Aren’t they seeing everything you’re syndicating elsewhere?

Well, here’s the trick: put links inside your syndicated posts (on your own blog, so they will also appear on the sites to which you syndicate), so that visitors to syndicated content can click back to your blog. It works. People will click through to your blog, and if they like what they see, they’ll click around more – and maybe even register for your newsletter!

Immediate benefits

In the early days of a corporate blogging initiative, every pageview constitutes a small triumph. You earn every single click you get. Over time, when the search engines kick in, it becomes easier to attract traffic. At first, however, it’s grueling, and your morale will suffer (in my case, severely). Content syndication can help take the sting out of the waiting game. You’ll get visitors clicking through to your blog from the site to which you syndicate.

And, you can take advantage of your target’s search engine visibility. Syndicate to a site or blog that has been around for a while, and it will probably have attained a solid page rank on Google. So, even if the search engine doesn’t see your content on your site, it will see your content at the syndication target. And, your target market will too. They’ll find you on someone else’s site, but at least they’ll find you!

This second-degree SEO – placing your content on a high-value site – will have a similar net effect to attaining a high page rank for your own blog, and it will drive incremental gains while you work on your own blog’s page rank.

Google News benefits

Google News is getting pickier about the content it accepts. Several years ago, I had no problems getting a corporate blog approved as a news source. Today, though, it just isn’t happening. The good news is that the site to which you’re syndicating may be an approved source for Google News already. You’ll get this additional benefit when you syndicate. Through the syndication target, your content will pop in Google News, pushing your brand and pulling people, through the syndication site, to your corporate blog.

SEO benefits

The syndication relationship, in addition to the near-term benefits above, is also likely to be one of the first links back to your corporate blog. This provides some serious SEO value, and it will help you attract your target market directly to your own blog.

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Photo: Search Engine People Blog via Flickr

Don’t look at them as pageviews

2012-04-16T04:00:00.000-07:00

Success in corporate blogging is often measured in pageviews. At first glance, it makes sense: this is an excellent and accurate measure of how popular your content is. Growth in pageview count indicates success in expanding your reach. The problem is that this myopic approach actually devalues what you have created. What your pageview count indicates is far more than eyeballs.

1. Sales intelligence: among leads, prospects and clients (rather than competitors and other stakeholders), each click/pageview is an indication of what is on that person’s mind. Take a look at which companies are viewing each of your blog posts. This is information you can provide to your sales teams as they chase down new business. Not only will it help them (it will), but it will also accelerate the internal credibility of your corporate blog, turning adoption into advocacy.

2. Competitive intelligence: when major competitors at my past companies have announced new initiatives around key industry issues, I wasn’t often surprised. Why? I tracked them on our corporate blogs. If a competitor is looking at enough of your posts, it’s safe to assume that research is being done. This is a golden opportunity for you to get to market faster, even with something quick and dirty, to preempt a competitor’s announcement.

3. Industry trends: which blog posts are getting the most attention? Well, this shows you what is on the collective mind of your target market. If a topic is resonating, you’ll probably want to publish more on it and make sure you get your company a leading position.

4. Strategy inputs: use the intelligence from your analytics to feed your corporate or marketing strategy. This is a dynamic approach to gauging market sentiment, identifying pain points and understanding where the industry is headed. Use it.

Every click on your corporate blog, every pageview, tells you something about the person who is visiting. This is valuable information that you wouldn’t be able to get otherwise. So, don’t treat them as pageviews, treat them as market intelligence.

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Photo: dailyfortnight via Flickr

When to use someone else’s infographic

2012-04-13T04:00:00.000-07:00

Everybody loves infographics. They look at them, share them and talk about them. It’s a great way to create engaging content that will really make the rounds. Unfortunately, they aren’t easy to produce. You need access to great design talent paired with the ability to generate relevant data and turn it into a story. So, you really need: a designer, a business expert (for the data) and a writer. That one image is turning into quite a project!

But, it’s worth it. The return on your investment, at least in getting people to your corporate blog or website, is likely to be substantial. Instead of biting the bullet, though, you can borrow instead.

Last week, I ran an infographic produced by OpenView Venture Partners (with their permission). The results were great for everyone.

By embedding it into a B2B Marketing Hub post, I was able to (a) get fresh content, (b) deliver something with visual impact and (c) gain the benefits of something that was shared a lot. The post was good for plenty of net-new traffic, giving me a chance to expand my audience.

Success.

And, it worked for OpenView Venture Partners. They got the link from my blog, and their branding and market intelligence are all over the infographic. As my post was tweeted and clicked, so was their infographic. I helped them generate more views.

The moral of the story: if you can’t develop your own infographics, see if you can borrow them (from a company relevant to your market but not a competitor. Everybody wins.

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Photo: truliavisuals via Flickr

How to evaluate corporate blogging traffic sources

2012-04-12T13:51:00.000-07:00

Where your traffic comes from is incredibly important. In fact, it’s the easiest way to evaluate the effectiveness of your targeting (unless you want to dig into the details of Google Analytics and look at each company that has visited). This is a great way to gauge how much waste traffic you’re getting.

In the B2B marketing world, you probably aren’t getting as much useless traffic as you think. Since most of your content marketing is probably targeted, you’re helping yourself out right at the top of the funnel. From there, it’s just a matter of looking more closely at your sources.

Google Analytics is structured to help you with this. Look at how the traffic source categories break down: search, referral, direct and campaign. Here’s how you can use them effectively:

Direct: this is the easiest to evaluate. Anyone who is coming straight to your site or blog either knows something about your company or has been referred (e.g., word of mouth or email) by someone who does. In general, you can count this as reliable traffic.

Search: in most cases, this is targeted as well, as they search expressions people use should be linked to your company or the services you offer. There are rare cases when this will change, particularly if news breaks in your industry, and people are scrounging for any information that’s remotely new. You’ll be able to weed this out through keywords, though, with those that are generic or tied to the news event generally being less valuable to you (from a marketing standpoint, at least).

Referral: here, you’ll need to go a layer deeper. What pages are referring the traffic? Those that come from relevant trade publication websites, social media sites or other targeted outlets are likely to be useful to you. Sometimes, a link will get picked up by an unrelated website and through some traffic your way, though. These are the clicks that won’t mean as much to you.

Campaign: whether it’s through your own email marketing efforts or a daily alert you have set up through Feedburner, this is traffic from known good sources. You’re inherently targeting, making this highly valuable traffic to you.

In the B2B marketing world, we don’t have to worry as much about sifting out “curiosity” traffic generated by a big, mass-marketed brand. In most cases, your visitors are coming for a reason. With the approach above, it will be easier for you to make the case to the C-suite that most of your traffic is solid, and you’ll be able to get a better sense of how much (or little) waste you have.

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Photo: takomabibelot via Flickr

How much time should you invest in your corporate blog?

2012-04-12T04:00:00.000-07:00

Tons. Seriously. You should make it your top priority.

I know this sounds downright crazy, but it actually works pretty well in the B2B marketing world, largely because so many companies are investing heavily in content already. In reality, you’re not investing more – rather, you’re just shifting how you produce it. Corporate blogging becomes the centerpiece of your thought leadership marketing efforts.

Most B2B companies produce white papers, reports briefings … whatever you want to call those PDFs that range from two to 100 pages and deal with one or a series of issues in the marketplace. The problem with this approach is that these white papers are time-consuming and expensive to produce, and the promotional value (not counting long-tail) is concentrated around the time of the release. You get one press release, one big rush to download the white paper – generally one bite at the apple.

So, what are you missing?

Well, there are interim benefits you could derive from the content used to create a mammoth document. If a white paper has several sections, you could release each section individually on a corporate blog and get roughly the same concentration of value described above for each installment. Basically, by taking the “big document” approach, you could be leaving 80 percent of its value on the table.

With a corporate blog, the dynamic is fundamentally different. Think of everything in the white paper as information (which shouldn’t be a stretch, because that’s exactly what it is). This information can be parceled out on a corporate blog, making it easier to reach your existing audience, attract new visitors from your target market and generate some sales and marketing intelligence through your web analytics. You’re still producing the same content, you’re just publishing it to your blog rather than assembling it into a big, expensive PDF. Ultimately, you get 5X the benefit for a much lower cost – and that doesn’t count any new readers you get through promoting the content to net-new readers through social media, SEO and so on.

When it comes to deciding how much time to invest in your corporate blog, start with your existing thought leadership/publications operation. Retool it to push content through a corporate blog rather than your existing channels. Your net investment shouldn’t change, and it will be substantial. How you execute, however, will be much different

Learn more about corporate blogging >>

Photo: cambodia4kids org via Flickr

Can you do a marketing video?

2012-04-11T12:24:00.000-07:00

Everyone wants to do video. It’s hot, it has impact and it’s possible. I remember the late 1990s, when there was plenty of talk – and lamentation – about video on the web. We all knew it was coming, but the infrastructure just wasn’t there yet. So, for more than a decade, people like me have been waiting for this day.

And then it came.

And then reality set in.

Here’s the problem: video isn’t easy. I’ve made several quick-and-dirty videos as a blogger (e.g., at Luxist), and at best, it was a lot of work for an awful product. You need to know video to be able to pull this off. If you’re not naturally attuned to it, you’ll work harder than you have to (I did) and be frustrated with the results.

That said, with the right approach and investment, you can crank out regular video for your website, corporate blog or press releases. Here’s how:

1. Be realistic: “professional quality” doesn’t mean what it used to. And that’s perfectly fine. Know what the outcome is going to be. If you don’t compare your white papers to the writing in The Atlantic, you shouldn’t hold your corporate videos to television standards.

2. Make it a part of your culture: don’t just plan to do one video. If that’s all you’re doing, you’ll work very hard, spend a boatload of money and have very little to show for it. If you’re going to do video, commit to it. The investment you make up front will be distributed across several projects, making the overall expense a bit easier to digest. Also, it will give you a chance to learn, make mistakes and ultimately put out a compelling product.

3. Buy it first: before making any big investments in equipment, find an expert. Hire an agency. Get someone who knows what he’s doing. Use your interactions with this hired gun as a learning experience. You’ll get a better understanding of the production process, which will influence your future investment decisions – for the better.

4. Promote it: use your video as bait. Just sticking it on your corporate website won’t do much for you … compared to linking to it or embedding it in your press releases, posting it to your blog, tweeting it and pitching it to online news outlets. You want as many people to see it as possible – after all, that’s where the ROI comes from.

5. Be smart: even though video is (obviously) all about the visual, it really is a content play. You need to have a message that matters, and it has to be clear. Don’t let the production process distract you from what really matters – i.e., what you’re trying to convey.

So, who does B2B marketing video well? OpenView Venture Partners. Check it out >>

Photo: torontocitylife via Flickr

Everything you need to know about lead generation [INFOGRAPHIC]

2012-04-06T04:00:00.000-07:00

What else is there to say? I saw this infographic on lead generation from OpenView Venture Partners and just had to run it here!

So, what do you think?

Source: OpenView Venture Partners

How do you outsource social media marketing?

2012-04-05T11:41:00.001-07:00

According to a study by Social Media Examiner, social media outsourcing is set to grow by 128 percent over the next two years. This year, 32 percent of companies are likely to outsource some social media functions, up from 28 percent in 2011 and 14 percent in 2010. Given the skills resident in many agencies, this is a positive development. Especially for B2B marketing companies new to social media, using outside resources can help you accelerate your entry into this channel while simultaneously making it more effective.

But, it doesn’t make sense to outsource all social media activities: some lend themselves better to this model than others. Below, take a look at the percentage of surveyed companies that outsource each social media function, as well as the relative merits and risks of each.

1. Design and development (20 percent): this makes sense to me. Social media application design and development can require special knowledge and skills (especially when it comes to the APIs), and it can be expensive to keep or cultivate them in house. Also, app designers and developers will have insights from across multiple clients, which can be useful to the marketing departments that engage them. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this number increase, especially through the use of packaged social media tools like those from Buddy Media, Wildfire and Strutta.

2. Analytics (11 percent): if you’re looking for advanced metrics – something more than click-throughs and likes – you’re probably going to turn to an external analytics platform (for this, I’m a big fan of Hubspot). This doesn’t necessarily mean you’re outsourcing the interpretation, just using third-party tools to gather them and provide a reporting and analysis framework. I’ve gone with both the in-house and third-party approaches, and I much prefer the latter, especially if you’re looking to truly measure the impact of social media marketing on your pipeline.

3. Content creation (10 percent): I have mixed feelings about outsourcing content development. For video, it’s generally a no-brainer (and to a lesser extent, this is true for audio). Yet, for thought leadership content and written material, I’m less enthusiastic about it. There are cases where outsourcing content development is prudent. Examples include: using a former employee who knows your business and the people inside it, engaging someone who is known to be knowledgeable about your industry (but not necessarily a former employee), finding a fantastic content developer who can bring additional value through a responsive personal social network or solid SEO skills and when you just don’t have the capabilities in house to do it yourself (and can’t or won’t invest in them). I know I’ve gone on a bit long here (I’m a content marketer at heart), but outsourcing content creation can be tricky. If you plan to do it, contact me, and I’ll help you out (tjohansmeyer [at] gmail.com).

4. Monitoring (7 percent): this can be easy to outsource, and it alleviates the need to commit people and invest in third-party social media tools. It’s a lot of work for what doesn’t always appear to be a direct return. The big problem is that much of the information you’ll get through social media monitoring will either be (a) a solid lead opportunity that requires either cultivation or selling or (b) “soft” information that could benefit messaging, product development or other internal operations. In both cases, it helps to be close to your organization, and there is understanding and access to people in your company that comes more easily from being in the marketing department. Knowing what matters most and who to contact with it is harder when you don’t sit inside a company’s walls.

5. Research and strategy (7 percent and 6 percent): Hubspot, in a recent blog post, warns about “gurus” and “ninjas” – and other absurd names social media consultants assign to themselves. I couldn’t agree more. Part of the reason companies aren’t outsourcing more social research and strategy, I suspect, is because there are so few providers with the guns to do a good job. Also, much of this needs to be tightly integrated to your broader marketing strategy, making it easier to keep these activities in house (for now).

6. Status updates (6 percent): this isn’t all that different from content creation, above. And why would it be? Status updates are social media content. Unless you have a great consultant who is tightly integrated into your organization, status updates can come across as flat and uninspired. Also, it’s usually easy enough to do this with in-house resources. It doesn’t take long and can be written in batches and scheduled with a tool like HootSuite. What I would suggest, whether you’re outsourcing this or not, is to have content creators develop bundles: for example, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn updates to be “packaged” with each blog post. It saves time and keeps your message consistent across all platforms.

7. Community management (4 percent): again, this is a tough one to outsource. You need to be actively involved and close to the audience. Unless you’re getting a consultant to make a significant commitment of time (and if you’re going to make one financially), it’s best to make this an internal function.

Source: Hubspot

Photo: Dmitir N. via Flickr