Problem: You’d like your website to be a source of prospects and leads for your sales team.

Goal: Attract more potential customers with the types of problems your products solve to your company website.

Tactic: Strengthen your website content by making content marketing a priority.  Content marketing is here to stay because buyers use online search tools to do their homework when purchasing anything.   Buyers also check out social media sites when researching online.  Products and services of all shapes and sizes are now at the mercy of the online researcher/buyer/customer.

For companies selling higher ticket products, your decision makers and influencers inside your prospects’ companies constantly search online for the best products/services to buy.   The way buyers determine who has the best widget can be influenced by who has the best problem-solving information (most valuable content) on their website.

Develop a content creation and publishing schedule and stick to it.

Make sure the content you create is valuable, remarkable content.    Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, authors of the new book Inbound Marketing, Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs have lots of useful valuable information on this topic.  They recommend that you think of your marketing function as half marketer and half publisher.

• Make sure your website content is valuable, educational (how-to focused), and shareable.
• Use your content to share your expertise.  Be generous with your knowledge and experience when creating your original content.
• Write an article  (or create a brief video) with the kind of content that your customers will want to forward to their colleagues and coworkers.   The kind of content they want to share.
• The Inbound Marketing authors call this remarkable content or shareable content.  How to content is great for sharing.

Benefits:
When your website content answers your buyers’ and prospects’ top issues, you’ll increase the number of web visitors in search of solutions that you provide.

More people looking for answers to problems (you solve) will find your website more often (Woot!).

Your website will become the online destination for people looking to solve the problems your small business can solve.

This begins a series of posts for small business owners, startups and B2B marketers that are new to using social media to grow their companies.  Or, are ready to reconsider established marketing tactics and look for new ways to achieve customer and business growth.

Every dollar and every minute you spend on marketing tactics is for one purpose:
business growth!   If you’re not satisfied with the growth from your current marketing tactics you’ll want to explore new options for attracting prospects.  That’s what I’ll be posting about in the coming weeks.

According to Gary Vaynerchuk, venerable social media entrepreneur, blogger, successful retailer, WineLibrary  expert, and author of the best seller Crush It! ,

Regardless of what business you’re in, you’re really in the content business. –Gary Vaynerchuk

So the sooner you get into the I-am-in-the-content-business mindset the better.

Also, I firmly believe that social media marketing and content marketing are excellent tools for small businesses.  Social media marketing is no longer a nice to have—it’s a must-have.   But before you jump on the Twitter/Facebook bandwagon, there are some key steps to take to get your small business marketing ducks in a row.
This means:

1. Define your goals
2. Create tactics that support your goals
3. Think though the benefits

Here’s the first example of a goal, content marketing tactic and benefits to using the tactic.

Goal: Sharpen your ability to stay on top of developing customer trends, issues and problems.

Tactic: Build your own process for listening online.   You probably have some proven ways of monitoring what on your best customers’ minds.  (Taking them to lunch or just checking in with a periodic phone call.) Map out a process that works for your company to accomplish the same goal online.

To keep up with online mentions of key terms used by using Google Alerts, Google Reader or other free tracking tools.   Fine-tune the list of keywords you track.

Review the terms your customers are using to search online for solutions and answers.  Issues may crop up online before your customers mention them to you or your staff in offline conversations.

Think how in control you’ll feel after setting up your own process to monitor your industry’s online conversations!

Related posts about monitoring online conversations and finding the right keywords to track:

Mashable’s post on How to use Google Reader

Identifying Keywords, How to Listen Online to Find Content Topics That Lead Prospects to Your Site

Colin Alsheimer’s great post How to Set Up a Listening Station

Photo: istock

Maybe you’re thinking about the best marketing tactics to give your small business a strong start this year.   I’m not a formal New Year resolutions maker, but I do think about what can I do better.  Maybe as a small business owner you’re thinking the same thing.  So when I think what is maybe the one goal that most small business folks have in common?

Grow by winning more customers!

Maybe your business growth plan this year is focused on winning new customers. Or, increasing your sales to existing customers.  Or getting more prospects to your website so you can convert them to customers.

Your winning, retaining or growing customer goals can all benefit from strong content that stands out from your competitions’ content.

My vote for a New Year Marketing tactic: creating and publishing a steady stream of standout website content.  Website content that attracts prospects to your site.  Content that people find so valuable that they share it with others.

Content = Marketing

When you think about content and marketing, they’re pretty much the same thing today.

Content is king.  We hear this everywhere.  Oh, we’ve heard cash is king.  We’ve heard customers are king.  Yes, but because of the way that social media is now, because of the way marketing is no longer in your control.

You want to have great content to make it easy for people who need your products and services to find you online.  No two ways about it.

Because every buyer, every influencer, every analyst, every journalist begins doing their job by searching online.  They’re looking for information and sources.  That means standout, keyword-rich content that the search engines can find, is even more valuable.

You are a Web Publisher

You can’t be just a businessperson or marketer any more.  You must be also a web publisher.  Whatever business you think you’re in,  you’re really in the content creation and publishing business. Sad but true…

You think about what’s your primary goal when working to grow your business.  One of your top goals is probably to stand out from the competition.  Now, you may have other goals with your website content:

• To educate your existing customers on using your products and services to reduce the need for making calls to your technical support, customer care center or office.

• To answer Frequently Asked Questions

But your overarching-goal, the golden egg-, the brass ring-goal is to create content that makes you stand out from the crowd.  Content that attracts the right prospects to your website.  Content that is so valuable, that your customers share it with their colleagues and friends.

Content with (well-chosen keyword titles) that stands out for prospects and customers, when they see it appear on a Google search.  or mentioned in a blog or when they find your blog, it’s content that says “oh, this company, this engineer, this expert, this author, this speaker, this entrepreneur really knows what she’s talking about!”

Content That Resonates

Content that says you get me!  You know where I’m coming from! I want more of this good stuff!  I want to see what else you have to say.   And then I want to talk to you.   Maybe you’re the person who can solve my problems or meet my goals.

That’s what marketing is—old marketing, new marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, product marketing.  It’s helping people solve problems and meet goals.

First with your standout, share-worthy content. Then with your products and services.

What is share-worthy content?  It can be any format of content that helps your customers and prospects.  ‘How to’ content is always popular.   The standard content types are:  company blog, educational white papers for B2B, (not white papers that are sales pitches) blog posts, Podcasts, webinars, brief online videos, and more how to articles.  Would your customers value checklists or guides?

So here’s the one necessary New Year’s resolution I have for you. Create and publish content on your website  that stands out.

What’s your best marketing tactic for the New Year?

Gary Vaynerchuk, the New York Times/Wall St. Journal best-selling author of “Crush It!  Why Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion” is a savvy businessperson that every entrepreneur, small business owner, marketer, CEO, etc. can learn from.

He’s raised the business use of blogging, online video, and Twitter to an art form.  He’s mastered social media as a method to reach out to customers, engage them and sell them products they love, like few others have.

Gary stopped by Carlsbad, CA (my hometown) a few weeks ago, thanks to Loren Sanders.  Loren Sanders owns North San Diego County-based Coastal Home Finder.

Gary Vaynerchuk, Nov. 4, 2009, Carlsbad, CA

Gary’s Story

If you haven’t heard about Gary Vaynerchuk, the short version is that he was a child-entrepreneur who taught himself to turn a profit selling baseball cards.  He then turned his family’s New Jersey wine retail store into a multi-million dollar operation.  I won’t waste space with how many blog readers, @garyvee  followers and Wine Library TV viewers Gary has now.  Check out Wine Library TV episode number 792 here .

The 140-page Crush It! is a guide not to just social media, but contains the code to doing business successfully in our Web-centric economy.    Gary speaks volumes to any businessperson that has a passion for their company, product or service.

Gary Vaynerchuk is also the most generous speaker I have heard in years.  He speaks from the heart; I could see him digging for more words to ensure that everyone got his points.

Content, Customer Service, Content

The key message of Crush It! and of his presentation in Carlsbad was not just that social media is the future.  He also believes that:

• Content is K-I-N-G.  No matter what business you are in,  you’re (first) in the content creation business.
• (Excellent) Customer service is mandatory.  Gary once  (when her order was misplaced) drove 3 hours one way in a snow storm to deliver a case of white Zinfandel to his wine store customer who needed it for a party.
• Passion for what you’re developing, selling, marketing is mandatory.
• Being authentic is, well, mandatory.

You can best create content, according to Gary, by consuming everything written, spoken, published about your industry space.  And then producing the most authentic content available and sharing it via social media.   Until 3:00 am if necessary.  (You get the feeling that to Gary, sleep is overrated when you’re launching a company or a product.)  He believes that when you’re following your passion you’re not going to feel the fatigue.

Lee Odden posted a terrific book review of Crush It! at Toprank Blog. Read it here.  Thanks, Lee!  You nailed it! I couldn’t have done a better job of summarizing Gary’s key messages.

Crush It the book

check out my friend Gary’s Business Book

add this widget to your site.

Gary Vaynerchuk fielded our audience questions with eloquence, tough love and truly helpful suggestions.  And he didn’t give up till we did!  Oh, then he kindly signed books for as long as we stood in line.  Generous.

Thanks Loren Sanders for bringing Gary Vaynerchuk to Carlsbad!  Thanks Gary for sharing your timely insights in a way that we can all get!  Everyone in the audience got a ton out of your wisdom.

What’s your opinion of the messages in Crush It!?

How Service-now.com is Beating the Goliath(s) in the IT  Management Software Space

Shannon Free-Cleveland, UCSD Extension, Matt French & Rhett Glauser of Service-now.com  (San Diego, Dec. 3, 2009)

• Does your small B2B business have a great story to tell and no one is listening?

• Are your primary B2B lead generation tools cold calling and large (pricey) industry events?

• Do you have more than 1 mention each month by your industry analysts/influencers?  Less than 1 mention each month?

If so, you’re where Service-now.com was about two years ago with their marketing efforts. Think: small team, small budget.  You may benefit from reviewing a presentation made at a recent Marketing Boot Camp I put together for the TechAmerica San Diego Sales & Marketing Roundtable.

Service-now.com is the industry’s first IT management software as a service (SaaS) provider. Two years ago the small startup company’s marketing efforts were not increasing visibility and awareness for the Service-now.com brand.  Service-now’s then 2-person marketing team dug in and tried new marketing tactics like content marketing using webinars, Twitter to drive attendance at webinars, blogging to keep customers and prospects informed and more.

The results? Service-now.com has nearly doubled annual revenues to north of $35 million, has won 335 of the world’s biggest companies as customers, and has over 130 employees.  And the marketing team is all the way up to 4 folks.

Find out how Service-now.com:

1. Dove into social media—Twitter, blogging, Ning and more—learning as they went along and began to get their story out.
2. Put their raving fan customers to work telling the Service-now.com story without asking anyone to spend hours/days writing a detailed document.
3. Created valuable content in the customers’ own words using cost- and time-effective webinars.

Here is Service-now.com’s PowerPoint from the TechAmerica San Diego event.   Enjoy:

In his video Qualman asks, “Is Social Media a Fad or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?”

If you’re a small business owner that is still sitting on the sidelines of social media marketing, watching this video is a wise use of 4 minutes.

Best quote: “We no longer search for news–it finds us. In the near term we won’t search any longer for products and services–they will find us via social media”

My favorite small business-impacting stats from the video:

- If Facebook were a country it would be the 4th largest (China, India, US, Facebook)
- 25% of search results on world’s top 20 largest brands are links to User Generated Content
- 34% of the world’s 200,000,000 bloggers post opinions about products and brands
- For most brands, their social graph is a more important ranking than their rank on Google

Read Erik Qualman’s list of statistic sources here. The 180+ blog post comments are interesting too.

Are your small business products and services ready to be found via social media?

If your small business is looking for ways to increase the number of web visitors—as most of us are—here are seven content marketing ideas.  The secret to being found online is a web site updated with an ongoing supply of fresh, relevant content when your prospects are searching for solutions.

Before you can Tweet your way to successful marketing and sales, you’ll want to publish lots of valuable content.   Content that sets you apart from your competitors.

Content Marketing Tactics:

1. Create original, relevant content that attracts your prospects. Invest time in asking your customers and prospects about their information needs. What kinds of answers/how-to’s/tips are they having trouble finding online?   What are their favorite information sites when problem solving?  Do they use online forums?  Blogs?  Trade publication sites? When do they use print sources? More content ideas here.
2. Generate content that stands out. Go way beyond FAQs.  Your competitors publish frequently asked questions. Break the mold.  Be creative.  As Seth Godin suggests: “Go to the edges…Start where the last person left off.”  Look for innovative content formats that are not common in your industry.  Short videos?  Coolest case study of the month? Top 10 questions people forget to ask when buying a solution.
3. Publish fresh content on your web site as often as you can. Searchers and search engines love fresh content.  Don’t wait for a new product release.  A press release doesn’t usually equal fresh content.  Unless it includes a customer success story using your products/services.
4. Monitor your Google Alerts and Yahoo Alerts closely. Track appearances of keywords relevant to your offerings. Check out the web site where your industry content is published.
5. Monitor your competitors’ content to keep up with current topics. Set up Google Alerts for competitor company names, products.  When the Alerts arrive, review the sites where your competitors are getting their content published.  Find the holes in competitor content.  Fill them with better content.  What’s missing?  What info can be presented better?
6. Publish a company blog.  If you don’t already maintain a corporate blog, it’s time to start because blogs are easier to update than (most) web sites.   By posting relevant content a few times a week, you will be more findable by the search engines and prospects.  I posted more about business blogging here.
7. Stay on top of the latest issues/trends talked about online by your prospects/customers. Check in often with the key social networking sites that your prospects use.  If you do not have time to do this—find someone that can.  Stay in front of your market’s info-needs curve by producing timely content about new issues that your prospects are facing.

A recent Forbes survey here of the online searching habits of 354 top executives confirms the need for relevant content.  Some key survey findings from these execs (firms with $1 billion-plus in annual revenues):

• Executives cite a more than 2:1 preference for viewing work-related information online (70%) instead of in print (30%).

• 53% of executives surveyed prefer to gather information online themselves.  Not delegate it.

• Are you selling to execs under the age of 40? These folks search online for information over 20 times each day.

• 86% said they occasionally or frequently click on linked words from Web articles and content

So, as an example, given the specific data provided in this post, how likely are you to click through to review the Forbes CSuite Digital Survey?  Or to read more about it at Forbes.com?

Related posts:

How to: 5 Social Media Marketing Tips from IndustrialInterface.com Co-Founder

He and his partners have gone from a brand new startup site a few months ago to 20,000 site visitors in October.  Brian explains how they have increased web site visitors,  leads, and conversions.

We asked Brian, What recommendations do you have for other small/startup B2B companies that want to begin to use social media to stimulate leads and find prospects—but aren’t sure where to start?

1) Don’t be a business.

The Internet allows people in every job to consume information that they find interesting at work.  If you can present relevant and useful information to your potential customers that is also fun and interesting, then you are well on your way to creating a valuable online brand.

2) It’s not always about marketing.

Internet users can smell marketing speak a mile away.  Why?  Because it’s usually meaningless drivel that conveys no real benefit to anyone.  Social media marketing is all about people sharing with other people.  You need to personify your brand to compete in this space.  If your company is just sharing its most recent product information, then no one is going to care.  Don’t be afraid to be personal, funny, controversial, and casual when representing your brand online.

3) Trust your product.

If your product stinks, then all the marketing in the world isn’t going to help.  If you’ve created a valuable website and clearly share the benefits of using your products, then users will be engaged when they get there.  You won’t always have to push your products on customers through these online avenues.

4) Choose the right medium.

There are a lot of popular social media sites that aren’t useful to every brand.  LinkedIn is for professional networking and business information, while Facebook is reserved exclusively for fun personal interactions.

• B2B social media efforts need to be highly targeted to be successful.

5) Monitor the right metrics.

Lots of people are interested in lots of stuff online, so traffic isn’t always a key to success.  Look to customer sign-ups, calls, or some other action that represents a real prospect doing something on your site.  Getting a thousand people to your site is useless if no one takes the actions you need.

If you’re marketing and selling to a technical customer, you’ll be interested in how startup company IndustrialInterface.com is creating and sharing valuable content. The interview below with T. Brian Jones, President & Founder
of Industrial Interface, offers key insights. Read on to find out how they are building their brand online using blogging, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Brian: It’s not always about marketing. Internet users can smell marketing speak a mile away. Why? Because it’s usually meaningless drivel that conveys no real benefit to anyone. Social media marketing is all about people sharing with other people.

1. Describe IndustrialInterface.com and what you do.

Industrial Interface is the quickest, easiest, and most efficient way for engineers to find industrial products and services. An engineer posts a project to our website, we notify relevant suppliers of the sales opportunity, and sometimes within minutes, the engineer is collaborating with a supplier who has a solution. Suppliers can review all the technical details of the leads we share with them, but the posting engineer remains anonymous. When suppliers find sales opportunities that are a good fit for their business, they pay us for the engineer’s contact information.

2. Who are your customers and prospects, and what problems do you solve for them?

Our customer base is two sided–Engineers and Suppliers.

The engineering side includes anyone who sources industrial products and services. This group includes degreed engineers, technicians, purchasing agents, project managers, manufacturing supervisors, maintenance personnel, among others. They currently rely heavily on past experience with suppliers or dated online industrial directories to find products and services for their projects. It literally takes weeks or months for an engineer to find an appropriate supplier for a particular need.

The supplier side includes anyone who sells industrial products and services. This group includes sales reps and sales engineers at manufacturers and rep groups. These salespeople currently must sift through endless cold leads to find a single sales opportunity. This is because current industrial marketing avenues cost a lot of money upfront and don’t guarantee any value over time.

An email vs. dozens of calls…

Industrial Interface makes sharing a design problem with dozens of relevant suppliers as easy as sending a single email. Engineers don’t need to call dozens of suppliers to track down the few that can fulfill their need, because our system does the work for them. We anonymously share their project with relevant suppliers and they either contact the engineer directly or share that lead with a colleague that is a better fit. We’ve leveraged the knowledgeable and well-networked supplier base to help us find engineering solutions.

Sample project posting from IndustrialInterface.com:

Our system also makes it incredibly simple for suppliers to qualify sales opportunities, collaborate with engineers, and share opportunities with colleagues, something our users do millions of times a day in the real world and are already doing on our website.

Leads = Sales Opportunities

By using Industrial Interface, engineers can shave weeks off their development time. We also allow them to find the best solutions during the concept and design phase of their projects, ensuring great savings over the lifetime of the design. Suppliers save time sorting through leads because every email they get from us is a sales opportunity. If they call an engineer from our site, it’s guaranteed that the engineer is ready to buy.

3. How are you using social media to build awareness, generate leads and win customers?

We are using a number of online tactics in unison. Our overall goal is to present our brand as a professional yet comfortable environment for engineers and suppliers to collaborate. Our social media efforts reflect this as they are generally tied not only to the Industrial Interface name, but also to Chris’ and my name and face. This allows us to leverage our expertise in the manufacturing industry to enhance the image of our brand, something that can be hard to do as a startup.

Blog = Quick Reads, Useful & Fun

Our blog is a major outlet for us to communicate with the online engineering community. We write mostly thought provoking articles that are interesting and quick to read. This way the blog is professional, useful, and fun. We don’t want to just be more technical white papers, as we need to appeal to a broader audience and only have limited time to produce content.

Twitter has been a great distribution model for our blog and other great content that we come across via my account @help4engineers. Chris has also grown @techsalesleads that we use to distribute leads that come into our site.

LinkedIn is a way to share information and interact directly with our customers. Along with various other engineering based social networks, LinkedIn allows us to spread our content and news about our company through groups and via direct emails to users.

We have also created an engineering resources toolbar via a website called conduit.com. We share the most relevant online resources for engineers and have created a toolbar of great value to our users. This way our brand is in front of them every time they use their browser, and our site is listed as one of the many useful resources at their disposal.

4. What led you to use Twitter as a lead generation/customer acquisition tool?

Twitter seemed like another great way to interact directly with our customers. It was also an early and quick way to get a “blog” up and running, as Twitter is often referred to as microblogging. What better way to share interesting information with your audience, present yourself as an expert on a subject, engage directly with your target users, and promote your brand all at once, with only a few minutes a day?

5. What kinds of results are you seeing?

With the combination of all these efforts, we had over twenty thousand visits to our site in October.

• Messages and content we share on our blog, twitter, LinkedIn, EngineeringExchange, and Globalspec’s CR4 often see dozens of comments combined and always result in meaningful and direct contact with our target customers.

Since our product requires a lot of trust for a user to try the first time, continued and positive exposure is key to our marketing efforts, as is speaking with them directly.

6. How much time and budget (approximately) does it take to grow your business using social media?

To distribute all of the content we create and to maintain an active presence on the sites we’ve discussed take roughly 20-30 hours per week. Since all of these services are free, the cost consists entirely of our time. To keep this effort reasonable, however, it’s important to know what process to follow every time a new blog post goes up or we have a product announcement. If it’s not clearly outlined, we can waste a lot of time.

So much of social media promotion is monotonous and tedious, but it can pay off over time, and every so often you get lucky. We have a recent blog post that has been viewed over 12,000 times via Stumbleupon, and it’s continuing to be viewed a few hundred times a day. This makes sense though, because I think it’s one of the best posts we’ve done.

There is a lot more to all this than simply distributing content, however. Our sites need to constantly be optimized to work with our marketing efforts and to more successfully convert visitors to customers. This is a never-ending effort, and one that we’re just starting to work on.

Recommendations

In our next post, Brian shares recommendations for small/startup B2B companies that want to begin to use social media to stimulate leads and find prospects—but aren’t sure where to start.

Learn more about or follow IndustrialInterface.com here:

IndustrialInterface.com

@Help4Engineers

@TechSalesLeads

Related post: 5 Social Media Marketing Tactics from IndustrialInterface.com

We all know we need to do more to help the planet and lessen the impacts of climate change in our own small and big ways.   The challenge for me (and you?) is what more can we do?  If we’re already driving less (more calls), working to go paperless in our offices, following all recycling rules…

What are other small businesses doing?  Here in California, the State has a program awarding small businesses with outstanding contributions to being green.

Nomad Cafe won an award for actually, proactively eliminating waste.  They also  waste reduction programs save the business over $12,000 (green dollars) per year. How cool green is that?!  BTW: Nomad is a small cafe in Oakland, CA offering fair trade coffee and locally sourced food.  Christopher Waters, owner, has been green since opening in 2003.

Christopher Waters, Nomad Cafe, Image: CoolCalifornia.org

CLIF Bar was founded by a guy on a bike ride that bit into an energy bar and said “I can do better.”  And did.   Now the company practices clean transportation—see their case study here.

Here are CLIF’s sustainability blog posts.   Green actions CLIF Bar & company has taken to earn their award:

• The trucks that transport its products between the bakery and distribution center have run on pure biodiesel since 2006.

• Also in 06 Launched a program called Cool Commute to help employees purchase clean-burning biodiesel cars. Employees who participate can receive a $6500 cash incentive to apply towards the purchase of a biodiesel or high-mileage hybrid vehicle.

• Employees can receive up to $500 for the purchase of a commuter bicycle. And incentives are offered for employees that use public transportation, carpool, or walk or bike to work.

Pacific Motor Service is a “Certified Green Business” that has been around since 1947.  To qualify for the award Pacific Motor reduced environmental pollution:

• They were assessed and then implemented changes in order to reduce/eliminate pollution
• They trained employees in pollution
• Scored at least 100 points on the Model Shop Pollution Prevention Checklist.

Find more California small business cases studies about helping climate change by driving less, recycling, using green energy, saving water and more here.