SMB Marketing Blog

The title of this article from BizReport is “92% SMB owners recommend business-focused online networking“, which is a great stat.  But in my opinion the bigger result from the survey conducted centers on ROI:

59% have won customers or done business as a direct result of online networking sites.

Furthermore, as business networking (the survey definitely shows a divide between “social” networking such as Facebook and “business” networking such as LinkedIn) shows significant ROI, the love is returned:

78% are open to purchasing from contacts made on such sites

While these results are from a survey conducted in the UK, I’m going to say that empirically they are valid for the business environment on this side of the pond.  For those of you who are skeptical of the power of social networking, some powerful numbers are starting to make a pretty strong case, all the more so when you can start measuring the result.  It’s one thing to engage in social networking on a gut call, it’s another to get measurable returns that justify the investment.

In the third of their very popular “How To” guides, this guide explores how to effectively use Social Media for marketing.  While a lot of ink has been spilled on this topic, this guide approaches it from a layman’s perspective, and focuses on the business case and a pragmatic way to implement in a way that will succeed.

“The spectacular growth of social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have taken B2B marketing by storm. B2B marketers recognized that they have access to hundreds of millions of people who have registered for and are using social networking sites.

More importantly, within those substantial groups B2B marketers can target their messages and advertising directly to the audience that will be the most receptive to their product or service, using the underlying technology inherent in social networking sites …

Social media differs from traditional media in that social media is where many individuals share information with each other rather than one source broadcasting to the masses. In Web 2.0 marketing language, it is many-to-many instead of one-to-many.”

Specifically it speaks to integrating Social Media efforts into wider eMarketing such as SEO/SEM and email marketing, all the while managing the flow of new referrals with proven marketing automation tools such as ActiveConversion.

Link to download page

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.

The folks at Forrester Research have updated their Interactive Marketing Forecast out to 2014. 

The table of contents has some predictable headlines:

• Interactive Will Cannibalize Traditional Media
• Interactive Marketing Spend Will Near $55 Billion By 2014
• Search Marketing Still Leads Interactive Spend
• Display Advertising Rebounds
• Email Marketing Continues Healthy Growth
• Social Media Fixes Itself In The Interactive Mix
• Mobile Marketing Matters – Post Recession
• WHAT IT MEANS – Interactive Trends Will Redefine Your Business

It’s a very good read, and a few points jumped out for me.

When faced with budget cuts or the need for immediate sales, these marketers find that interactive tools are less expensive, more measurable, and better for direct response than traditional media.

Empowered consumers today expect a customized, interactive brand experience that goes way beyond a 30-second television spot or two-dimensional print ad. Forty-two percent of online adults and 55% of online youth want to engage with their favorite brands through social applications.

And last, even laggard industries feel that they have enough experience and data to prove interactive marketing’s worth. Online display spending by telecom companies in Q1 2009 grew 50% over Q1 2008.

What was also interesting was the the potential for more growth; interactive marketing ad spend is still under represented and laggard compared to how much of sample media time is spend online.

You can sign up for a copy of the full report here, courtesy of  DemandGen Report. Check it out. Your marketing future may depend on it!

ActiveConversion recently published a lead nurturing guide that we at the SMB Marketing Blog would like to share with you (link, or click on the image at right).

From the landing page for the guide:

Lead nurturing is the process of communicating with prospects who are not yet ready to buy.

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 lead nurturing B2B 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, follow this link or click on the image to the right.

(eHow To Guides)

‘Social Media Revolution’ – some say the biggest thing to impact our world since the industrial revolution, others say just a passing Fad.    You judge …….

In the “olden days”, a web site was part of an SMB’s collateral; you had one because it equaled credibility, or because everyone said you had to have one.  It was part and parcel of the main “all or nothing” goal of marketing; get them to call your phone number.  You were sceptical of anyone who came near you wanting to talk about Web Marketing because the ROI from your website was terrible.

Since the “olden days” Google has fundamentally changed the landscape.  How many of us recycle the last version of the yellow pages unopened when the new one comes out?

The study found an overwhelming number (85 percent) of business buyers go online during the purchasing process, and 83 percent found the vendor from which they eventually purchased online. Of those using the Internet, over 70 percent start with a search engine.[source]

So the new goal is to get found by Google through Search Engine Optimization (SEO), driving potential customers to your website.  Other tools drive traffic to your site; PPC and banner ads, email campaigns, link referrals, and drip or nurture email campaigns, are all ways to increase the number of visitors and eyeballs looking at your website.

But instead of just pushing these visitors to do what the brochure of old asked them to do (call your business phone number), a new breed of software – Marketing Automation Software -  is letting your website be much more than a brochure.  This new breed of Marketing Automation software, of which ActiveConversion is one example, uses a well designed SaaS based solution as a heart rate monitor, measuring which of your potential customers have a faster pulse.  By faster pulse I mean which ones spend a lot of time on your site and visit a lot of pages vs those that see one page and leave.  Which are so interested that they come back a second time, and execute goal clicks, calls to action, or fill out forms?  Which among your anonymous visitors exhibit the same behaviours, and are worth cold calling?

This class of SaaS based solution keeps a long-term history of the heart rate read-out for your website, they spot trends, show buy signals by showing historical click streams, and announce when a potential customer is worthy of one of your limited sales cycles, worthy of a phone call from you, instead of passively waiting for them to contact you.

Strap a heart rate monitor on your website!

Our 'burning' Lighter

I caught up with an old colleague this week that I hadn’t seen in years. We traded stories and did the ‘where are they now’ thing and talked about how we had taken the career paths we had. As diverse as those paths were and the different businesses that we’re in, we ended up on the topic of social media. Amazed at the power, yet still respectfully wrestling on how to fully capitalize. As an aficionado of great consumer electronic products, he quickly brought out his iPhone and showed me an app from Smule, the Sonic Lighter . He fired it up and I saw a very real looking natural flame flicker on the screen, that waved back and forth with movement of the iPhone and the flame even flickered when you blew on it … kind of cool, but I quickly dismissed it as a novelty at best. The big ‘so what’? Then he connected the iPhone to the network, and with a view of google earth, he said, “check it out, these are all the Sonic flames ‘burning’ in the world right now”. The world? Right now?. It was amazing to see at that global level. He navigated to north America, zoomed down to a street level view of the city, and there was ‘our’ flame flickering on the map. A couple of blocks over, another flame. I’ve been in the GPS industry and around technology for many years, so that part I got. And we all remember the hype around LBS apps and the press on ‘find the nearest Starbucks’, but the concept struggled on a number of fronts. Yet now,  there it was. A global, ubiquitous platform of iPhones which provided a medium for these colored flames – A community, so simple, yet so powerful. Most of what we’ve seen with the iPhone to-date is at the personal or consumer level and centered around entertainment, but there are B2B marketers all over the world salivating and looking to take advantage of this reach.  As a B2B Marketer, are you going to be one of the pioneers …… i-Marketing.

Boxers or Briefs?

BTW – Smule is now running global polls based on flame color. So for $0.99 download the iPhone app and take part in that long standing debate … briefs or boxers. To track the world’s preference, view the Smule Under-pants Map at http://app.smule.com/soniclighter/boxerbrief/.

BTW -As real as the flame appeared, it’ll never replace the waving back and forth of the good old bic flame at a great concert ….. now i’m just dating myself

So the question circling of late, over the past weeks for me but arguably it probably goes back months for some, is whether there is true business, or more specifically marketing value for B2B within social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  “It’s about tapping into the network, it’s about building brand, it’s about SEO”, -  I’ve read it all. Facebook is more social, LinkedIn is for the business professional, and well Twitter … a fad!

As an executive in a SaaS based start-up in B2B marketing automation for SMB’s, I’m looking into how to capitalize on these mediums and so I have been exploring and evaluating all of them. And for me it came down to -  Can you make money on your investment, albeit in this case the big investment is time. That being said, isn’t that what all business decisions come down to?

So in cutting to the chase and as the title proclaims, I’m a sceptic turned convert. My first experiences were frustrating to say the least. How could this possibly add business value through marketing, it’s noisy -I didn’t care what people were eating at that moment (albeit amusing at times), physically doing, etc.- and it consumed way too much time and I wasn’t getting any immediate return. But with time and invested effort (ie don’t follow those Twitter’ers that post what they’re doing, literally), it started to fall in line.  As they say, patience is a virtue.

The decision for me was about going back to the fundamentals of marketing.

The definition on Wikipedia states: Marketing is defined by the American Marketing Association as the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

Seems straight forward and obvious. Social media clearly presents a medium for communicating, delivering and exchanging of offers, the question is whether you can identify YOUR customers, clients and partners within the membership. Hey, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it … the opportunity lies for those able to “crack the hard nut” and find the customers in the communtity.

So again, it comes back to Generate, Manage and Convert – generate your leads through inbound marketing activities through the social media groups. Manage and nurture the leads with an automated marketing solution. And in the end you identify qualified leads ready to convert to sales. An investment with a measurable return – Business value!

So I began the process as a sceptic and now confess I’m a convert. And who wouldn’t be …. A large community, green fields, many challenges, but apparent opportunity and a clear demonstrated value for a start-up business like ours by using Social Media to drive our inbound marketing. An apparent ground swell there for the taking. So we’re currently using social media to raise awareness, build brand and grow the top line through new customer acquisitions.

We’ll see where this adventure takes us ……..

You can find me on;

Twitter - www.Twitter.com/tsydoryk

FaceBook - http://www.facebook.com/people/Terry-Sydoryk/884015014

LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/pub/0/028/648