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.

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.

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!

You’ll now see the addition of some B2B Marketing blogs on the site  (right hand side of the website). These are blogs we regularly read and contain great insight for the B2B and SMB market. I’m sure you’ll find them of value, just as we have. We’ll continue to manage the blog roll as we monitor and find new and interesting B2B Marketing blogs …. Keep it tuned here.

Anything Goes Marketing
http://www.anythinggoesmarketing.blogspot.com/index.html
http://twitter.com/chadhorenfeldt
Chad Horenfeldt – The concept of Anything Goes Marketing is simple: Don’t let theories or best practices restrict you when it comes to marketing – specifically B2B e-marketing. We all know that in marketing, anything goes and if you don’t, it’s time that you did. Expect to find tips and tricks to improve your online marketing skills and some harsh comments for poor campaigns, articles and posts that I come across – beware!

B2B Lead Generation Blog
http://blog.startwithalead.com/
http://twitter.com/brianjcarroll
Brian Carrol – CEO of InTouch, part of MECLABS Group (MarketingExperiments, MarketingSherpa, InTouch) and author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale (McGraw-Hill 2006) and the B2B Lead Generation Blog with expertise related to B2B marketing, lead generation and complex sales.

B2B Marketing Confidential
http://www.b2bmarketingconfidential.blogspot.com/index.html
Andy Hasselwander – B2B Marketing Confidential is published by a ten-year veteran of B2B Marketing who has worked with over 20 Fortune 500 companies. It aims to provide an unfiltered view of the craft from the perspective of a doer, as well as aggregating and analyzing major news from across the B2B marketing landscape.

Business-to-business (b2b) and industrial marketing blog
http://www.b2blog.com
Dave J. – I am a marketing manager for a manufacturing company. I started B2Blog to have a place to talk about the dramatic changes in industrial marketing. Because I am writing a personal blog about my professional life, I prefer to keep my exact identity and employer on the QT.

Customer Experience Matrix
http://customerexperiencematrix.blogspot.com/
http://twitter.com/draab
David Raab – is a consultant specializing in marketing technology and analysis. Clients have included major firms in financial services, retail, communications, and other industries. Mr. Raab has written hundreds of articles for DM Review, DM News and other industry publications.

Duct Tape Marketing
http://www.ducttapemarketing.com/blog/
http://twitter.com/ducttape
John Jantsch – has been called the World’s Most Practical Small Business Expert for consistently delivering real-world, proven small business marketing ideas and strategies. He is the creator of the Duct Tape Marketing small business marketing system and Duct Tape Marketing Authorized Coach Network.

The Funnelholic
http://www.funnelholic.com/
http://twitter.com/funnelholic
A blog for those of us who live and work at the top end of the b2b funnel: Demand Generation, Lead Generation, Online Media, B2B Sales and Marketing, Marketing Automation, DRIP, Lead Nurturing, and Fun.

LeadSloth on Demand Generation
http://www.leadsloth.com
http://twitter.com/jepc
Jep Castelein – B2B marketing is moving online big-time: print advertisements, trade shows and direct mail are losing out against online advertising, email marketing, webinars, blogging and website optimization. We see new marketing automation tools popping up that help marketers cope with this change. But it’s a challenge to find the right tools: there is not a lot of information available online, and some tools are hard to classify.

The Lonely Marketer
http://www.lonelymarketer.com/
http://twitter.com/PatSchaber
Patrick Schaber – My focus for this blog is writing about and generating discussions on a variety of current marketing trends. Everybody wants to talk Social Marketing and search engine optimization. I do to! We’ll talk plenty of online marketing as well as other aspects of marketing.

Marketing Crackerjack: Lead Generation and Nurturing Nut
http://www.marketingcrackerjack.com/
http://twitter.com/cdubia
Carson Poppenger – Marketer & Founder – Urban Response, Salt Lake City, Utah.

Marketing Operations at Work
http://mopartners.typepad.com/marketing_ops_at_work/
http://twitter.com/mopartnersceo
Gary Katz – CEO and founder of Marketing Operations Partners, Gary is a visionary and thought leader in the emerging Marketing Operations field.

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