SMB Marketing Blog

The days when all you needed for online marketing was a nice website have long passed.  In order to be effectively represented online, you’ll need effective campaigns on several critical platforms.  The platforms vary depending on the type of business you are in, but for those of you still finding your footing; here is a short checklist of platforms you should consider.

Stable Content

• Website: Since its 2010, you should have professional website.  If you don’t have one, get on it.
• Bonus Points Wikipedia Entry: Businesses haven’t fully embraced Wikipedia but it is the authority for information reference.  Having a Wikipedia entry will become increasingly important for online credibility and exposure.

Regularly Updated Content

• Blog: A critical platform for establishing credibility with the online community and search engines.  If your organization doesn’t have a blog, you are missing out on establishing yourself as an online authority in your industry.
• Bonus Points Periodical Press Releases: Press Releases still have their place online, particularly when pushed out with a service like PRWeb.com.  It can do more than just a blog posting or website update as it pushes to many channels, allowing for more exposure and credibility.

Social Networking

• Twitter/Facebook Fan Page: Twitter and Facebook are the kings of social networking and an increasingly important platform to promote dialog between companies and the online community.
• Bonus Points LinkedIn/Foursquare: LinkedIn and Foursquare aren’t for everyone, but depending on the kind of business you do, these maybe valuable platforms to reach potential customers.

Video Media

• YouTube: YouTube continues to be a predominately an entertainment focused community, but its reach is undeniable.  If you have how-to videos, or a business presentation, they are good candidates for YouTube.
• Bonus Points Webinar: Webinars are a great way to interact with customers and the community.  Webinars add great value for any customer base.

Search Engine Marketing

• Google AdWords: This isn’t a must but for those of you who are just starting out, or struggling in competitive markets, pay-per-click campaigns with Google can get you that exposure when you need it.
• Bonus Points Pay-per-click on Facebook/LinkedIn/Yahoo/Bing: Although Google is the most recognized player; pretty much every major platform (Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo, Bing, etc) has a similar version of the pay-per-click program.  They may present a less competitive and more targeted environment to push marketing efforts.

Depending on your business and goals, the platforms mentioned may not be critical.  Also keep in mind that just because you are represented on these platforms doesn’t necessarily mean you are being represented well on each platform.  However, how to assess your effectiveness on the various online platforms is the topic for another post.

Do you have other platforms that are critical to your business’s online marketing strategy that you feel should be on this list?  Please share it with us in the comments.

Social media is becoming a popular avenue for businesses by creating a voice for their business and attracting prospective leads by distributing details, free offers and news about their product & services. For a long time, social media was looked upon as a personal communication channel, where you could provide your opinion about personal things. Since that time Social Media has greatly evolved into a channel for businesses that want to leverage social networks to share their respective experiences and how others can benefit from their offering.

Many have seen Social Media as a distribution channel, a value add asset for potential leads, and a means to offer promotions that will in turn entice people to follow them and be their customer.

Join Yves Matson, as he shares emerging best practices that effectively integrate Social Media into online marketing.

Webinar Title: How to use Social Media in B2B Marketing

To access the webinar recording, click on the link below:
http://www.foundpages.com/social-media-webinar.html

Topics included:

* Utilizing newsletters, blogging, case study publishing, and webinars for social media marketing
* Using Social Media as a distribution channel for blog, newsletter, or website content
* Case Study: How ActiveConversion uses Social Media Marketing for B2B marketing and how they measure ROI using marketing automation.

The principal sponsors of this blog, Active Conversion, are offering an limited time 60 day free trial if you sign up as a result of reading this post, so here’s a quick look at what to expect:

After you’ve taken a few minutes to activate your trial account and install the Active Conversion code, you’ll begin seeing results immediately and within days patterns will begin to emerge.  To start with, visitors to your site will be identified by company name.  Some of these visitors may surprise you and as a B2B marketer or sales professional you’ll gain valuable information about which companies are interested in you.

After a while some visitors will start to jump out at you, repeatedly returning to your website to visit more and more pages.  Intuitively you may have pegged them as higher value and more qualified but now you have quantified data to back that hunch up.

For the trial, most marketers or sales professionals simply used the default lead scoring.  By looking at the online behavior of your visitors you’ll begin to correlate that to the lead score that each visitor accumulates.  Eventually you’ll be able to develop your own lead scoring criteria based on the behavior of visitors to your own site but for now you can see that higher lead scores mean higher quality leads.

If your site has pages with form fills using the same default conventions as Active Conversion, your visitors that have previously been identified by company now become people with names, email addresses and/or phone numbers.  In other words, leads.

You’ll also want to take an email nurture campaign for a spin during your trial.  Load up some content into a nurture campaign, pick say 3 emails over six weeks, and anytime any of the respondents clicks through on a link, they are identified as though they had form filled on your website.

Eventually when these leads are presented to your sales team the lead information will include a summary of their activity.  This will give your reps some background for that all-important first call.

This has been a quick look but you can see that even on the trial, things happens automatically, like it’s on cruise control.  We haven’t even talked about, lead nurturing, lead management, email marketing campaigns to your existing in-house lists, or social media ROI tracking.

Feel free to pass this offer along to your network, as long as you or they use this sign up page they’ll have access to a 60 day trial.

There’s mounting evidence that the popularity of Twitter has hackers and phishers shifting focus to Twitter accounts.

According to researchers at Kaspersky Lab, cybercriminals are trying to sell hacked Twitter user names and passwords on-line for hundreds of dollars.

While this is an outgrowth of existing security problems…

[data-stealing malware is] popular because criminals are starting to realize that they can do better than simply swiping credit card numbers. Bestuzhev has seen Gmail accounts for sale on Russian hacker forums, (asking price 2,500 rubles, or $82) RapidShare accounts going for $5 per month, as well as Skype, instant messaging and Facebook credentials being offered.

…Twitter is being singled out because of the premium hackers and phishers can charge for them:

…one Twitter account, with just over 320 followers, was offered at $1,000 in an underground hacker forum. The user’s name was a simple three letter combination that Bestuzhev thought might make it more valuable to criminals.

The answer is to use the same vigilance with Twitter as you currently use with email. Evaluate the link you are about to click on (URL expander plugins for Internet Explorer and Firefox that will show you the extended URLs without you having to click on them), use a strong and unique password, always check that you are at twitter.com before logging in, and select third party apps with care.  Learn more here.

ActiveConversion recently released another in their popular series of “eHow To” guides.  This one deals with using Marketing Automation to leverage B2B Blogging.  From the summary:

Lead nurturing is the process of communicating with prospects who are not yet ready to buy. B2B Blogging enables marketers to contact such prospects on an ongoing basis.

Only 10 to 25 percent of all leads are sales-ready. A similar percentage of leads are not qualified at all. This means 50 to 80 percent of all leads generated are potentially wasted if no appropriate action is taken.

With B2B Blogging marketers can realize significant benefits. Leads that are not sales-ready are not lost and significant online lead generation effort is not wasted. Automation of lead nurturing increases the ROI of all online marketing activities.

To download this whitepaper on why, when, and how to implement an automatic lead nurturing plan for your business, click on the image!