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.

We at ActiveConversion make use of various social media channels – with our presence in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn groups, Slideshare, YouTube, Digg, StumbleUpon, Flickr and many more. Keeping track of all these social media channels and updating them on a regular basis is difficult and time demanding, but if we use them smartly they work very well to our advantage. With the advent of Internet and as the web 2.0 matures, the online community is an ever growing powerhouse, and it is quintessential to engage with our audience.

Broadcasting

Traditionally websites were developed as a brochure, with static content, one way communication. But as Web 2.0 matured, websites became more than just a brochure. It was necessary for companies to adapt to this ever changing World Wide Web where two- way communications was more than a necessity for any B2B type company. This communication can be in any form; blogs, forums, and online community etc. Similarly, social media channels started as a means of personal use. Twitter & Facebook mainly started as people to connect with their family and friends to let them know where they were or what they were doing or simply share activities and photos. Now B2B companies can also use Facebook and Twitter, but it is important to know the difference between using these channels to broadcast your message versus using them to engage with your targeted audience.

I recently attended “The Art of Marketing” event and found a very close connection in all the speeches that had a common theme of “Engaging”. It is important to understand that our users or customers, and our audiences are the most powerful and the biggest advocate for our products. For B2B companies, the new way of creating customer relationship is by engaging and knowing who their audience is and what are they talking about. Here are some of the speakers who talked about engaging with the audience:

Mitch Joel, the author of “Six degrees of separation” said the Internet is almost going to be as important and pervasive as the electricity”. In the social media world where B2B marketers are trying to connect with as many people as they can and create a solid followers base, it is important to understand that it is the basis of who is following you more important than how many followers you have.

Engaging

Gary Vaynerchuck, author of “Crush It!” cleverly stated that “Internet is just a baby and it still has to grow up and unleash its power”. Whether you are in B2C or B2B, Twitter, Facebook’s and similar social media accounts are a must have. If you don’t have either of these, it is not too late to jump on the bandwagon. Facebook credits are soon going to be precious currency and if we don’t use Facebook, and there is a big chance that companies might miss out on large opportunities in the future.  Social Media should be used intelligently in a way that we not only broadcast our messages and offers but to engage and be involved with our audience. Having a conversation with our audience, providing opinion, resolving issues on the go and engaging with our audience is a key.

Sally Hogshead, the author of “Fascinate” said, “Create messages for our network’s network”. Don’t ignore the larger network which is linked to our immediate network. Social media lets you connect to this web of networks that you simply can’t ignore.

So go ahead and start engaging in conversations!

You likely must have heard about social media by now.  Social media is not a personal communication tool any more, you can use it for your business as well. You may have noticed that large number of websites have the three most famous; Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn symbols on them so you can easily follow and broadcast websites that you like.  This has been quickly adopted by those in the ‘know’ because it makes it easy for your social networks to know about websites that you like.

In fact, you can now give the Facebook ‘thumbs up’ for websites, assuming the website has the Like button installed. On April 21, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook announced that there will be over 1 billion likes across the web in the just first 24 hours of the “Like” button. Over a million websites have added this feature to their websites and blogs in just 48 hours, and the number grows steadily each day.

So why should you care? You now have the ability to harness the power of other people’s virtual networks to bring visitors that might be interested in what you do – without spending a dime or pushing them to react! It also has instant credibility because it was passed by a friend or business associate. And don’t think it’s just about your small network of 100 friends, but also about those 100 people’s networks.

Besides the obvious referral your website might get, there are SEO factors at work in the background, making your website/blog come up more frequently on search engines, that will get search engine and ‘feed’ traffic as well.  You can get heard over the noise by letting your social network endorse your content. Google likes to rank content that is popular with real human beings, and this is an easy way to that.

For those that were still skeptical about social media for business, this should convince you and perhaps make you a believer. For an example of how the like it button works, go to FoundPages or ActiveConversion, to see how it has been implemented on these websites. And remember to click ‘Like’ if you like what you see!

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 “eHow 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