B2B Marketing

I recently saw an estimate that 20 percent of B2B marketing organizations today use marketing automation technology. But how many of those are using it effectively? I suspect that's a much smaller number.

It's a shame, since marketing automation can offer so many benefits when it's used effectively. And when it's not used effectively? Well, let's just say there are easier ways to waste money if that's your goal.

With that in mind, here are eight of the most common mistakes companies make when they implement a marketing automation solution. Avoid these errors, and you'll be far more likely to reap measureable benefits.

1. Fuzzy prospect profiles. You can't do lead generation without a clear lead profile. Get your stakeholders together, talk to existing customers, and build your ideal lead persona.

2. A lack of interesting content. Content marketing is the fuel that powers your marketing campaign. And remember: Quality content serves the customer's needs first, not your own needs.

3. Lack of teamwork. Your sales and marketing teams need to collaborate on every aspect of a marketing automation project. When in doubt, it's better to over-communicate than it is to risk misunderstandings.

4. Failing to document. I don't mean software documentation - I mean documenting the process you use to build and implement your lead-gen campaign.

5. Not getting high-level buy-in. Marketing automation can affect your entire organization. That means you need a high-level champion to shepherd the project and to communicate clear, company-wide goals.

6. Building unrealistic expectations. Marketing automation can drive tremendous ROI and energize your marketing efforts. But that doesn't make it cheap or easy - and suggesting otherwise just sets you up for failure.

7. Failing to use metrics. A marketing automation solution gives you access to a remarkable set of metrics. Use them to get constant, actionable feedback on your B2B marketing campaign.

8. Not updating your website. Sooner or later, all marketing roads lead to your company's website. And nothing will derail a marketing automation project faster than an outdated or hard to use site that drives away prospects.

Every business specialty has its own language. I know this all too well, since I come from an information technology background where you can literally drown in a sea of acronyms, abbreviations, and arcane terms.

The world of B2B marketing isn't much better, especially if you're new to it. Online marketing in particular uses a jumble of cryptic abbreviations that can intimidate outsiders. If you own a small business, however, it's essential that you get a working knowledge of these terms.

I can't run down every example here, but I will get you started with a list of 10 essentials. Better yet, you can use these terms to do additional research and learn even more about the field.

ROI: Return on investment. It means exactly what you think it does: The quantifiable return you can expect to get on any business investment.

CPM: Cost per thousand. This usually refers to the cost of purchasing 1,000 online ad impressions; it's related to CPI (cost per impression). Both of these involve the number of online ad impressions actually served, not the number readers click on.

CPC: Cost per click-through. Also referred to as PPC (pay per click), this is another online advertising model where advertisers only pay the publisher when the ad is clicked on - not just served.

CTR: Click-through rate. This is the number of clicks on an ad divided by the number of impressions. Publishers that can guarantee higher click-through rates generally command higher prices for their ad space.

PPL: Pay per lead. This takes us one notch higher on the Internet advertising ladder, where advertisers only pay for lead generation, as defined by some specific action like completing a registration form or a survey.

CPA: Cost per acquisition. This is usually defined even more specifically than PPL - when, for example, a customer actually makes a purchase on the advertiser's site.

PR: Page rank. This usually refers to how Google ranks a website's relevance to a particular search term. In Google's case, ranking in the top 10 is the magic number, since that puts you on the first page of search results.

PV: Page view. A metric that shows the number of times visitors view a particular web page. Note that this is not the same as the number of individuals who view the page.

SEM: Search engine marketing. This is a vital (and extremely lucrative) marketing specialty that emphasizes the role search engines like Google play in driving traffic to a website. Search engine optimization (or SEO) is usually considered an important part of SEM.

SMM: Social media marketing. This is SEM's fast-growing kid brother. It covers everything from marketing a business on Facebook and Twitter to using social content such as blogs and online video to drive lead generation efforts.

Like I said, we're barely scratching the surface here. But if you start your B2B marketing research with these terms, I'm confident that you'll find more than enough useful information to keep you busy.

Marketing analytics tools today can produce mountains of data. Whether you're using a free tool like Google Analytics or a full-fledged marketing automation system, it's tempting to assume that quantity equals quality.

It doesn't. In fact, too much data can sink your B2B marketing strategy - and it'll drive you nuts in the process.

Choosing the right metrics for your own digital marketing campaign is a tough balancing act. To some extent, it depends upon your industry, your business model, and your individual marketing goals. But I'll help you get started by introducing some of the key metrics that can deliver useful, cost-effective B2B marketing insights.

For the sake of clarity, let's break these down into two categories: One related to search-engine optimization (SEO) and Web traffic; the other dealing with social media.

Key SEO and Web Metrics

Total organic traffic. By this, I mean traffic to your website from all sources - including search and social media.

Search-engine rankings. This is one of the core elements of any marketing-metrics package.

Popular search phrases. Another vital metric, since it creates a feedback loop for your website keyword-optimization strategy.

Time on-site and bounce rates. Bounce rates tell you, among other things, that people who find your site either don't get what they expect or don't like what they get. Either way, it's vital feedback.

Most popular pages. Bread-and-butter metrics like page views and organic traffic may be more important, but I would argue this one is just as essential.

Social Media Metrics

Subscriber trends. How many people subscribe to your blog, news feed, or other content via RSS or email? These folks are vital to your social marketing strategy, and they're worth their weight in virtual gold.

Conversion ratios. How many visitors to your blog or forum become subscribers?

Followers/fans. Another obvious metric, and one you should take very seriously.

Referral sources. Which social-media sources deliver quality traffic? How do Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, and other sites figure in the mix?

Search-engine traffic. I think this is especially important for blogs, since a growing body of unique content (something you're creating, right?) should drive a corresponding increase in search traffic.

For every metric I mentioned here, there are at least five more I could have discussed. But that's the point: There's almost no end to this process, and it's way too easy to get caught up in the numbers, rather than focusing on what they can tell you.

Start with a small group of metrics, learn how to analyze them, and constantly tweak your website, your content, and your digital marketing campaigns based on the feedback they provide. It's a slow process at first, but it will pay big dividends over time.

I recently came across a study that found 82 percent of all companies now use content marketing as part of their B2B marketing strategies. That's more than the number using search engine marketing - and twice as many as the number using print, TV, or radio advertising.

I'm not surprised. You shouldn't be, either.

Content marketing is a simple concept. It's the process of creating original content - blogs, videos, white papers, and other assets - to drive lead generation and promote a company's brand. It also serves to establish a company as a subject-matter expert and a thought leader in its space.

Why is content marketing so popular today? There are a few reasons.

1. It's inexpensive. Or perhaps I should say it's cost effective, since that's just as important. Some of the most effective marketing content you can create - blog posts - cost little or nothing to produce. How much did your last broadcast media campaign cost?

2. You can measure the ROI. In fact, you can measure your content marketing ROI in excruciating detail, using metrics that quantify your lead generation, conversion rates, repeat visitors, and other key indicators.

3. You focus on the customer's needs. Promoting a product or service isn't usually a conversation; it's a monologue. Customers get sick of that fast. Content marketing allows you to serve customers by sharing your knowledge, experience, and thought leadership on topics they care about.

4. It's incredibly flexible. Your ability to conceive, launch, and scale a content marketing strategy is limited only by your imagination - not by your budget. In fact, some experts would argue that the best content marketing takes a deliberately low-budget approach that emphasizes substance over style.

What's the downside to putting content at the center of your B2B marketing strategy? Well, there's a learning curve, but it's really not very steep - especially given the ROI you'll get once you climb it. So get started with content marketing, and discover where it can take your small business!

We all know that software-as-a-service (SaaS) has changed the way small businesses think about B2B marketing. But what's the real advantage driving these businesses to adopt SaaS?

Price is part of the answer. Pay-as-you-go pricing is a huge draw for small businesses that no longer have to worry about hardware costs, software licensing, support and maintenance, or any of the other financial baggage that comes along with on-premises software.

B2B Marketing SaaS: The Real Secret to Its Success

But price isn't the whole answer. In fact, there's an even bigger benefit to using SaaS for digital marketing: It allows small businesses to use applications that only very large enterprises could have used in the past.

SaaS-based demand generation tools are actually a perfect example of this evolutionary process. These online applications include an immense array of B2B marketing-related tools and services. A top-tier vendor in this space, such as Eloqua, Marketo, or Market2Lead, will offer a package that might include:

• Email marketing management;
• Multi-channel integration of Web, email, and live-event marketing;
• The ability to create custom landing pages, website forms, and microsites;
• Tools for creating personalized marketing campaigns;
• Event marketing capabilities;
• Contact database management tools;
• Lead scoring, nurturing, and reporting;
• Social media marketing and tracking capabilities.

I'm just scratching the surface here, and I could name a dozen other companies that offer similar SaaS-based online demand generation products. Some are less expensive than others, and some are more suitable than others for very small businesses versus midsized firms. All of them, however, deliver a package of services that typically cost between a few hundred dollars and a few thousand dollars a month.

A B2B marketing organization might find the same features in on-premises software, but they'll have to add a few zeroes to the cost to get it - and they'll have to pay a good chunk of that right up front.

Picking a SaaS Marketing Solution: 3 Things to Consider

So far, so good. You're sold on the concept of SaaS, and you'd love to adopt a digital marketing solution that gives your room to grow at a fair price. If you're ready to take the plunge, here are three tips for evaluating a solution beyond the obvious stuff, like pricing and support options:

Scope. Just about everybody in this market can support Web and email marketing tasks, and most also play well with third-party CRM and SFA solutions. But what if you want to use the same software to manage an integrated direct mail marketing campaign? How about integrating data from conferences and live events?

There are demand-generation tools that can manage multi-channel B2B marketing campaigns, and some of them do it quite well. Just remember that you'll pay more - perhaps a lot more - to get all of this in a single tidy package.

Scale. Small and midsized businesses don't worry much about how these SaaS-based digital marketing solutions will scale. That's only a problem for the big guys, right?

Actually, you might be surprised how quickly scalability becomes an issue even for smaller companies. That's because smaller companies have smaller marketing teams, and those teams often manage multiple campaigns with lots of moving parts. Select a demand-generation solution that can support Web templates, for example, and it'll be much easier to make changes while protecting your brand with a clean, consistent set of shared assets.

Feedback. Metrics are the modern marketer's secret weapon: They allow you to quantify results and demonstrate ROI in a way that you could never do in the past. That's why it's especially important to look at a vendor's analytics tools. Ask how they track things like website activity, campaign response rates, and cost-based marketing metrics.

Is direct mail marketing dead?

It's a common question these days, and we all know why: Email, search, social media, and other forms of digital marketing are all the rage. They're cheaper than direct mail, they're faster, they deliver better feedback, and they ultimately deliver better ROI.

Right?

Actually, I don't think direct mail is dead yet. It might even be getting its second wind.

Direct Mail Still Gets Results

According to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), 1.4 percent of U.S. households in 2010 responded to direct-mail pitches. That's down a bit from the 2005 numbers, but that number is still more than double a typical email marketing response rate, according to the DMA.

While those numbers don't directly address B2B direct mail marketing, I think it's safe to say they're comparable -- especially in terms of how they compare to email response rates.

We all know why those email response rates are so low. Bulk email is a saturated marketing channel, and the signal-to-noise ratio is unbelievably low, even for sophisticated online lead generation efforts.

Those numbers don't mean direct mail is a slam-dunk for every small business. They simply mean that direct mail can still have a place in your marketing mix - if you know how to identify, target, and build a trust relationship with the right prospects.

4 Ways to Marry Direct Mail and Digital Marketing

So direct mail definitely is not dead. But technology has transformed the way it works. Here are some specific trends you need to follow in order to use direct mail effectively.

1. On-demand printing. Throw away the cookie cutter: It's now possible to create small, highly customized batches of direct mail with content tailored for specific customer segments or for groups at different points in your marketing pipeline. You'll get higher response rates, and you'll get them at a very reasonable cost.

2. Integrated direct mail/digital marketing campaigns. You can use direct mail to drive prospects to custom website landing pages, social media pages, video demonstrations, whitepaper downloads, or any number of other destinations. This type of thoughtful, carefully-crafted content is essential to identifying qualified leads and setting up your sales team for success.

You can also experiment with new options, such as QR codes, to simplify the process of integrating direct mail marketing and digital campaigns.

3. End-to-end personalization. What do you get when you combine on-demand printing with so many different digital marketing choices? You get the opportunity to deliver a completely personalized marketing experience for every prospect. That's an opportunity that you couldn't buy at any price just a few years ago.

4. Analytics. Now more than ever before, the tools exist to measure the responses to your direct mail marketing campaigns. In fact, it's important that you NOT launch a direct mail campaign until you have a plan in place to track and measure your results.

Like I said, this doesn't mean direct mail is always appropriate for your small-business B2B marketing efforts. But it's important to experiment with direct mail, just as you experiment with social media, video, email, and other activities.

So direct mail isn't dead. And if you know how to use it right, it can give a healthy boost to your small business' bottom line.

Social media marketing can feel like a treadmill where your small business never quite finds its footing. Keep running long enough, and it's easy to lose sight of your true small business marketing goal: consistent, cost-effective lead generation.

Social Media Marketing and Lead Generation Done Right

Here's the good news: Social media, used correctly, is one of the most cost-effective lead generation tools your business can deploy. There's simply nothing else that can deliver this much ROI on a B2B marketing investment.

So what does it mean to use social media the "correct" way? Here are five specific examples:

1. Never quit experimenting. Some social media sites are gaining ground as B2B marketing platforms (YouTube, LinkedIn) while others are in decline (MySpace, StumbleUpon). Behind those broad trends, however, almost every small business marketer discovers a unique mix of social media platforms and content that delivers the best results.

Don't be afraid to try new things, and don't be afraid to fail - there's simply too much to gain here from experimenting and fine-tuning your online lead generation efforts. Tweak your business blog topics, and fine-tune your writing voice. Work with podcasts, video, and other types of social content. Even efforts that fail to generate leads can provide valuable feedback about what works and what doesn't.

2. Don't forget to deliver a call to action. The conventional wisdom holds that a call to action over social media will damage your credibility and hurt your relationship marketing activities. Yet there are limits to this attitude - after all, many of your prospects want to buy and are looking for information about your business.

A well-crafted call to action gives prospects the opportunity to get the information they need while still showing respect - and delivering value - for everybody else. Whether your call to action involves a website, e-book, whitepaper, registration/landing page, newsletter signup form, or some other response, you need to integrate it into every aspect of your social media marketing strategy.

3. Give prospects somewhere to go! It sounds simple, but you'd be amazed how many businesses overlook this step. If your individual social media marketing efforts are the spokes in a wheel, then think of your landing page or website as the hub. All roads lead here - so be sure you provide a compelling destination!

4. Robust social media analytics are a must! By "robust" I definitely don't mean analytics that deal only with a single social media tool. Those are useful, but they never give you a coherent view of your marketing strategy.

Instead, I'm talking about the growing crop of social CRM and social media management tools, as well as increasingly sophisticated marketing automation solutions with built-in social media analytics. These products, including those from major vendors like Salesforce.com, Sugar CRM, and Eloqua, provide the hard data you need to drive your social media marketing and lead generation efforts.

(What follows is an excerpt from David Shedd’s book Build a Better B2B Business: Winning Leadership for Your Business-to-Business Company, which is available at Amazon.com)

Most likely, a number of potential new customers are contacting your business today to see if you can help solve their problems: they will walk through your doors; they will call you on the phone; they will contact you by E-Mail; they will connect with you through your Website.

• How will these potential customers be treated? 


• Will your company be easy for these customers to do business with?


• Will your company’s professionalism show through?


• Will their phone calls or E-Mails be returned?


• Will you solve their problem?

We are all aware of how difficult it is, at times, to buy from companies.  In fact, I experienced just this in the last two weeks.

My wife discovered some old style 3.5 inch “floppy” disks with pictures of our children when they were very young.  We wanted to be able to access these photos and keep them in our digital library.  But, we no longer had a drive that could read the disks.  My first stop was the local Audiovisual store which promises to help with “all things audio and all things video.”  The uninformed clerk at the store had no idea what I was talking about.  But, he took my information and promised that the manager would call back as soon as he got back to the store.  I am still waiting for the call.

Now, it was time to buy a 3.5 inch disk reader that could connect to my computer allowing me to transfer the photos myself.  So, I went off to three different electronics chains, two of which specialize in uncommon pieces of electronics.  None of them had it in stock.  And none of them gave me any assistance or suggestions to help me find what I was looking for.  In further research, I found that one of the chains had what I needed at a neighboring store.  And another chain had it on their website.  Alas, this was too late; I had already bought it on Amazon.

Each of these companies had the opportunity to receive my money.  But, they all dropped the ball.  To them, I was a simple inconvenience, not a customer with a problem to be solved.  Yet, they lost something bigger than the $20 I eventually spent; they lost me as a potential customer the next time that I have a similar, somewhat out of the ordinary, request.  And they do not even know that they have lost my potential business.

Most B2B businesses proactively manage the sales funnel to make an unqualified prospect into a potential customer into a completed sale.  But, what about those potential customers which are not on the sales funnel or not on the sales plan?  What about the unknown customers who have already taken the initiative to contact your business?  How many times a day do we drive away these customers because of our lack of responsiveness or inability to even begin to help solve their problem?  And how much does this cost us in terms of lost business and lost growth that is all but invisible? 

Two further anecdotes:

The Good: One $4M a year customer helped lead us into a new growth market.  This customer initially contacted us and a few others with a phone call after the customer had done an Internet search.  We were the only ones that responded promptly and professionally.  Thank goodness.

The Bad: A few years ago, I met a potential customer at a local networking event.  After we got to know one another, he remarked that his company purchased a lot from our local competitor.  I asked him why he had not considered buying from our company, especially as we were well-established in the market.  His response was sobering: “Oh, I tried to buy from you.  First, no one ever returned my call.  Finally, I did manage to speak with someone.  But, he told me that since my request was not a standard product, he did not have the time to help me.  So, I went to your competitor.”

Three takeaways:

• If you can, track all calls that come into your office, even those from new and unexpected customers and ensure that you are doing your best to serve them. 


• Consider following up with these new customers a little while later.  These customers could be fruitful; they already know you exist, and they have already taken the initiative to contact you.  And if you have helped them, they may already think positively of you.


• Even if the customer request is tangential from your business, you can help them down the path of solving their problem.  It rarely takes that much extra effort and, if need be, “you can always say ‘No’ later.”

By Reb Risty

Social media can be mean, and there is no avoiding her.  You treat her like a friend—fun, easy going, and someone you look forward to seeing.  Surprise! As in high school, one day people are talking, and everyone knows what you did last weekend. 

It seems most social media talk these days is about the good. But what about the bad? Do you know what to do when an unhappy customer voices his or her complaints on social media?  As the use of social media grows, businesses can’t ignore this very real and growing situation. 

For many B2B organizations there is still hesitation about the value of social media.  The company I work for is no different.  Six months after implementing a social media strategy, we find our customers using it to communicate with us.  By the way, our strategy includes daily monitoring to ensure that we hear what is going on.  We use a couple of tools—HubSpot and Hootsuite. 

During the past six months, our social media interaction has been very casual without much excitement, until last week.  Even though it is accepted that customers are free to voice the good and bad, we really weren’t expecting it. “It,” being an angry customer calling us out on Twitter and YouTube.  An excerpt from the twitter feed is below.  Once I saw the post, I put together a quick powwow with key decision makers regarding this customer.  There were suggestions to just call or email instead of responding via Twitter.  It was even suggested deleting the tweets. Yikes!  Since the customer had chosen Twitter as the medium of communication we had to respect that.  We agreed to respond via Twitter and a phone call.  The customer chose Twitter.  With our first “ugly head” incident brought to light, we needed some internal education on social media as well.

Here’s a quick walk-through our Twitter feed with the customer:

Customer: What will it take to get Vintalk SIP trunks up?  Does anyone at your company have a clue about customer service?

• This is actually a great example of how a customer can get a company’s attention.


• Because of our proactive approach, of monitoring our social media, we were able to catch this comment and respond quickly.


• To add a note, the customer never utilized the customer portal.  Doing so would have opened a trouble-ticket to address the issue within 24 hours with tech support, instead of the marketing department.  In other words, the most well-thought-out customer support process can and will be ignored.  Customers are going to communicate the way they want.  Be prepared.

• It’s best to respond even if you don’t have an answer.  This will help reassure the customer and hopefully stop any more nasty tweets. 


• Also, I wanted to discuss our response with the account manager and the COO.  This is the beauty of working in a smaller organization--people are easier to assemble.   

• Good answer, direct and to the point.  It only took a few minutes with tech support to get these directions.


• The customer did move to working with tech support via the phone after this tweet.

• At-a-boy … score for us!


• Not only is the customer happy, but the company looks like a champ.  Reaffirmation from the customers is the best PR you can get. 

• Know that you do have control and can win the customer back.


• Respond immediately, even if you don’t have the answer or resolution.  The fact that you are listening will help ease the situation.


• Realize there is a whole world of customers and potential customers watching.


• If the conversation should be moved to a private platform, that’s ok.


• If you know an issue is going to arrive, get the message out first.  This will mitigate nasty posts and comments.  It may even help with customer support calls.

Risty, the Vice President of Marketing at Vintalk (www.vintalk.com), is an expert in corporate brand management and online marketing with a focus in SEO, inbound marketing and lead generation.  She is responsible for developing and executing clearly defined marketing and communication strategies to support Vintalk’s growth objectives, while creating and enhancing brand awareness and equity.

(What follows is an excerpt from David Shedd’s book Build a Better B2B Business: Winning Leadership for Your Business-to-Business Company, which is available at Amazon.com)

Face Reality: Most companies in most industries will not discover the “silver bullet,” the “magic elixir” that returns them to the exciting growth track of the past.  As Yogi Berra said:

The future ain’t going be what it used to be.

Instead, growth will come from serving current customers better and (as a Bain and Company study found) “finding profitable opportunities within the boundaries of current operations.”

Thus, your most likely success strategy will come from growing outward from your current customer base.  To do this, you need to turn your current satisfied customers into your biggest allies and best friends.

How?

• Survey them


• Listen to them


• Team with them

Institute a simple customer satisfaction survey.  GE and others have used a two-question customer satisfaction survey with success:

On a scale of 0 – 10, how likely are you to recommend this supplier to other people?

0 – 3: Negative

4 – 7: Neutral

8 – 10: Positive

Do you have any comments or suggestions for ways that we can serve you better?

With such a survey, you learn whether your customers are satisfied or not.  This can be a yellow warning light to make you aware of problems or of your company’s need to enhance or improve your product or service. 

The key is to make this survey or any survey as easy to respond to as possible so that your customers actually respond to your survey request.  Alas, many companies try to make it easier for them to collect and collate the survey results while making it harder and thus less likely for the customer to respond.  Instead, stick the short survey in an E-Mail and ask the customer to answer the questions and hit the Reply button. Personally, I am glad to respond to a survey like that. It takes me two minutes and I get a chance to share my thoughts.  But, I rarely click on a hyperlink to take me to a survey. It takes too much time, and I dread that the survey is going to be 30 questions long.

For those customers who are uns`atisfied, follow up and redress the issues raised; make sure that the customers know that you have heard them. For those customers that are very satisfied, ask if you can use them as references or ask for testimonials.

2.         Listen to Your Customers

Your current customers are a gold mine of information if you listen to them.  If you pay attention they will give you a deeper understanding of their industry and your competitive position as a supplier.  They may tell you about:

• Upcoming changes at their companies and other companies in their industry


• Your relative competitive position in the market


• New opportunities in their industry or in other industries

(The section on how to team with your customers will appear in a future entry.)

By Paul R. Lloyd                   

Three phases occur whenever you attempt to sell a complex product or service to a new client or customer. These are the phases you must pass through in the process of building a relationship with your prospect. The key to understanding the phases is to think about the question most likely to be in the prospect’s mind at the beginning of each phase.
1. Who Are You?
Since business-to-business selling is relationship driven, start with the relationship itself. From the prospect’s point of view, that means learning who you are. The challenge is that you have no relationship at this point. If you meet a prospect at a trade show or other event, the odds of that person remembering who you are after five minutes are low. As a result, your job in phase one is to focus on building a personal relationship with the prospect.
While your company needs to do all the marketing communications things that inform, persuade, and motivate a prospect to action over time, your sales team’s role is to be about the business of adding value on a personal basis. Offer advice, solve problems, answer questions, and when the time is right, offer invitations to networking or non-business functions. The idea is to become a business friend to the prospect. At some point, this personal relationship building process slops over into phase 2…
2. Are You Still Here?
Once you have built a reasonable business relationship with someone, they are usually willing to speak with you or respond to your e-mails. At this point, you are ready to focus on selling your products and services. You are in a position to feed into the prospect’s natural reaction when reminded about you – “Oh, are you still here?” or “Oh, are you still working for that company?” During this phase you are continuing to build the relationship while strengthening prospect awareness of how you can be of service through the products and services you offer.
In addition to direct marketing activities that build awareness of your company, build the relationship with credibility-building marketing communications activities such as publicity placements in trade publications and online thought leaders like Hoovers. Now that the prospect knows who you are and what you do, you want them to start seeing your company name frequently in the business world.
3. What did you say you do?
Okay, the prospect now has some degree of trust in you and your company as a viable potential resource. The final question arises when the prospect is ready to make a purchase. Notice that the prospect is in command, not you. The question on the prospect’s mind involves clarification of how you may be able to solve the specific problem at issue. “What did you say you do?” The prospect is looking for confirmation that you can solve the problem they need fixed.
In complex sales, the communications materials don’t always line up with the problem as the prospect perceives it. In this phase, the focus is on your ability to customize and sell a solution that solves the problem at hand. Think of this as the proposal stage if you like, although the idea of relationship selling is to bypass the normal bid process as a single-source provider if you can.
If done right, you’ll notice that price is not the main issue. Solving the client’s problem is. If you attempt to rush the process… or if the buyer is rushing the process… without going through these three steps, the focus is more likely to be on price rather than solution. That’s because the buyer won’t have the confidence, trust or knowledge to recognize the value proposition you are offering. Why? Because your value proposition includes you as an individual and your ability to instill confidence that your proposed solution will indeed solve the problem.
Paul Lloyd is the founder of Zuk-Lloyd Associates, a marketing firm that delivers solutions, develops strategic initiatives and implements them with a flair for the creative. He can be reached at paul@zuklloyd.com

By Roger Bostdorff

Recently I was called by a construction company to provide them information regarding helping them create a Strategic Plan. Evidently they are part of a group of contractors across the country and this group suggested that they needed to create this thing called a Strategic Plan.

They called me in as well as another company. After meeting with me for 30 minutes and the other organization for about an hour, they called me to tell me they wanted to work with my company to facilitate their strategic plan.

Many times a strategic plan is created, put in a notebook and left on the shelf to collect dust. However, this is NOT the way I suggest we do it.

First we asked the management team to define their three year goals. This certainly includes sales revenue, but it also could include customer satisfaction, employee morale, market share, etc.  Once these goals are identified we then start working on a SWOT analysis.

A SWOT analysis focuses on the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) of your organization. As this economy becomes more and more global and challenging, we have to do an internal grade card on how our organizations measure up.

How does an organization get started in doing one of these? They take some time away from the day to day grind and go ask themselves the following questions and then discuss and debate the answers.

Strengths-

• What Advantages Does Your Company/Organization Have In the Marketplace?
  
• What Does Your Company Do Better Than Anyone Else?
  
• What Unique or Low Cost Resources Does Your Company/Organization Have Access  To?
  
• What Do Others See As Your Company’s Strengths?
  

• What Could Your Company Improve On?
  
• Where Does Your Company Have Fewer Resources Than Your Competition? (People, $, Manufacturing Capacity, etc.)
  
• What Should Your Company Avoid?
  
• What Are Others Likely to See As Your Company’s Weaknesses?
  

• What Obstacles Does Your Company Face?
  
• What is Your Company’s Competition Doing?
  
• Are The Required Specifications For Your Job, Products or Services Changing?
  
• Is Changing Technology Threatening Your Company’s Position in the Marketplace
  
• Could Any of Your Company’s Weaknesses Seriously Threaten Your Business?
  

• What Good Opportunities Are Open To Your Company?
  
• What Trends Could You Take Advantage of? (i.e. Changes in Age of Population, Lifestyle, etc.)
  
• Looking At Your Company’s Strengths, How Can You Turn These in to Opportunities?
  

Now you are half-way home. If you agree that it is important to understand the SWOT for your organization, then you should also agree that you should do this exercise for your major competitor. If your business is in a market that is growing, then everyone can ride the positive curve. However, if your market is not growing then the only way to grow is to take market share from someone else. In order to do that you need to focus your strengths on your competitor’s weaknesses. 

As you contemplate whether your company has the time, energy, manpower, etc. to spend on this endeavor, let me ask you a question. How will you feel if you discover your major competitor is doing their SWOT right now?

The SWOT analysis is followed by a discussion regarding how you take your strengths to leverage against your opportunities while minimizing your weaknesses and threats. This discussion revolves around how you accomplish your 3-year goals, by first accomplishing your short term goals (1-year goals). We do this by creating specific action plans with completion dates and responsible parties identified. All of these plans are laid out and we establish periodic meetings to insure that the action plans are getting done. Without the follow-up meetings these action plans seem to slide with the challenge of doing the day to day business.

If a company does not have a strategic plan then they typically operate day- to-day and never seem to understand why the company is not growing or accomplishing greater good.  Does your company have a strategic plan? Does your largest competitor have one?

Roger Bostdorff is the President of B2B Sales Boost. He spent over 30 years with IBM in sales and sales management.  B2B Sales Boost is a consulting company helping organizations improve their sales and overall business processes.  You can find more about B2B Sales Boost on the web at www.b2bsalesboost.com or calling 419-351-4347.  If you would like to receive the B2B Sales Boost Newsletter please send an email to sales@b2bsalesboost.com

By Dion Patrick Kenney
Everyone is talking about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and, with its explosive IPO performance, LinkedIn.  It is widely recognized as a revolutionary force in communications and for building coherent, connected communities.  By now, nearly everybody has seen YouTube videos that have “gone viral,” reconnected with old friends on Facebook, shared photos on Photobucket and received links to news stories or funny cartoons from co-workers.  And it’s been widely covered how Social Media – Twitter, Google and Facebook in particular – empowered the organization of the Arab Spring.
But to follow the media coverage, you might conclude that Social Media is a phenomenon for primarily for person to person (P2P) interaction, and more recently a marketing phenomenon for consumer-focused (B2C) businesses to tap into all those fashionable young consumers.  Social Media, however, is a revolution of seismic proportion, not merely a temporary fad, that will forever change commerce and business operations, with tremendous implications for business-to-business (B2B) companies.
The underlying power of social media is the concept of the social graph – that ultimately we are all interconnected in a sea of overlapping networks.  The technologies developed and commercialized since 1993 have transformed “Seven degrees of separation” from a mathematical concept (and parlor game, when Kevin Bacon-ized) into a powerful business model for connecting business resources and capabilities.
Ignoring, for the time being, the potential for organizational efficiencies and operational enhancements, and focusing only on relationship building and communications, the power of Social Media is actually more ideally suited to the nature of B2B marketing than to B2C.
Social Networking is first and foremost about engaging audiences and building relationships, i.e. interaction.  Traditional B2C marketing’s focus on advertising, promotion and PR is the antithesis of engagement.  It is instead focused on spending marketing budgets and effort on impressions and click-thru rates.  This is also a pattern, or trap, that B2B marketers can fall into – focusing on crafting clever collateral and forgetting the value of relationship building and prospect interaction.
Credibility and established networks are critical to effective B2B marketing, and also to Inbound Marketing, the term used to describe marketing efforts – such as blogs, SEO and Social Media - that facilitate potential customers finding you.  This compared to traditional marketing, or Interruption Marketing, such as print ads, television ads, telemarketing/cold calls, direct mail/e-mail, etc., whose effectiveness results from intruding on a customer’s activities.
Your social media strategy, efforts and all online information (blogs, posts, videos, tweets, whitepapers, slideshares, employee bio’s, etc.) should be created with a sensitivity to the perspective of a prospect in your marketplace researching vendors.  The old admonition about email messages “never write anything you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the NY Times” is even more appropriate in the world of Social Media, because unlike yesterday’s front page, everything lasts on the Internet forever!
The second potential Social Media pitfall for the B2B business is to assume that participation is optional.  If a bad online impression is unfortunate, a complete lack of a presence is a terrible, and increasingly fatal, phenomenon.  No website?  You don’t exist.  No LinkedIn profile?  You have no industry experience.  No Slideshare/Tweets/Blogs/Whitepapers?  You have no expertise and nothing to say.
OR … you do exist, have meaningful experience, expertise and something worth hearing, but not the vision or understanding of the game-changing nature of Social Media.  Look how well that approach worked for the governments of Egypt, Tunisia and Libya.
Dion Kenney is a Principal at y2 Strategic Group, a Social Media consulting practice, and can be contacted at dkenney@y2strategic.com.

Photo by Tim Hipps

By Tom Dougherty

Most B2B marketers gets brand wrong.

They think of brand as either useless because it doesn’t prompt the direct response of a sales call or they use it as a sales argument, meaning the message is usually about product benefits, quality service, efficiency and even cost.

There are numerous problems with this thinking.

Let us count the ways: 

• Those brand messages are not differentiators. The competition also claims product benefits, quality service, efficiency and reasonable costs. Those are definitions of the category. You must have them to even play in the game, but don’t mistake them for creating preference.
  
• When those bland brand messages are communicated, the brand ends up becoming a reflection of the company, not the customer. This inside-out view means the brand is less emotional because it makes each purchasing decision exist in a vacuum. If a ballpoint pen, for example, markets the reddest ink, the consumer only buys that particular pen once. But if the brand of that pen says something about who the customer is when they use it (like how Nike says its customers are those who “just do it”), then that customer will seek out that brand of pen every time if getting things done without the nonsense – the meaning of “Just Do It” - is the highest emotional intensity to the target audience.
  
• Brand works when it is about the customer. If you look at it a certain way, there is a relationship here with sales. What makes a good salesperson? They listen. Those who talk all the time do not make the sale because potential customers don’t see themselves in the sales argument. They haven’t participated. Same with brand. Brands that talk about the customer have customer participation and ownership.
  

We as humans, even those in B2B, backfill our emotional decisions with rational ones. It’s related to the old sales thought that you never go wrong picking the market leader, even though smaller companies may have stronger sales arguments. The market leader is the safe choice, an emotional choice.

There are numerous examples of brand working in a B2B market, such as Citrix Systems and its GoToMeeting product, which transformed an industry that already had videoconferencing;

Verifone in payment processing is another example, which succeeded despite numerous competitors offering the same service.
Even in the sales discussion, a B2B brand is important because it explains why you (as the company) do the things you do. The argument goes like this: “Because we make sure you (brand promise), we are proud to introduce the (product) with (product benefit).” To use Nike as an example (a consumer brand, I know), a sales argument would be, “Because those who wear Nike shoes just do it, we have the 6.0 Zoom Oncore shoe that gives you better grip and responsive cushioning.”

That is far more emotional than simply, “We are proud to introduce the 6.0 Zoom Oncore shoe with better grip and responsive cushioning.” With a brand, you’ve told them the reason why those product benefits are important.

Therefore, when building a B2B brand, think of it the same way as if it were a B2C brand: Make it about the customer, build it around the highest emotional intensity in the market so that it succinctly delivers the single most important message to prompt a change, and always lead with it.

It’s that important. There are no immature markets any more and, even in B2B, the only differentiator is brand.

Tom Dougherty is the President and CEO of branding company Stealing Share (www.stealingshare.com). His blog can be viewed at http://blogs.stealingshare.com.

By Ricardo de la Blanca

Globalization has dramatically changed how businesses market and sell their products and solutions to other businesses. With more choices than ever, it has become critically important that sellers be local and social, or adapt their brand to a specific market.

UIltimately, the brand is the intellectual and experiential substance behind the value you create in your customers’ mind. This is far more than just creating a brand perception. It is about ensuring the delivery so that brand perception and brand reality becomes the same thing.

In order to be successful in a global scale, there are important tasks to take into consideration: Talk to your audience. Find out their needs from your brand. Understand the perception they have of your offering. Look at the competition and consider your position within the market. In line with your audience preferences and needs, consider the core aspects of localization and how this should be woven through your strategy.

The next step is to address the core strands of your strategy at a local level:

1.            What is your proposition specific to this market? And how do the brand attributes need to be aligned to meet the cultural needs of the market?

2.            Choose the best local channels to communicate your message in the most efficient way.

3.            Align content delivery across your chosen channels and consider how this content should be used to achieve your search goals.

4.            What are the social media platforms within your chosen market? What is your audience using them for and how can they be used in combination to meet your global social strategy requirements?

5.            Set up local delivery within your chosen technology solution. Adapt your solution to fit market requirements.

Being local is key because even tough some regions share similar needs and taste; the reality is that each country and culture has its own personality and its own set of challenges. Marketers must review the framework for each market and implement strategies that are specially adapted for a particular country, but always preserving the message of the brand. It is very important to be familiar with the environment and habits surrounding the region of work. For example, after several tests, we at DLB Group realized that some Central American countries do not have a high Internet penetration and mobile services in comparison with others in the Latin American region, so in this case, it’s important to take action and develop parallel activities that communicate the message and reach consumers more efficiently.

Devising a strategy that emphasizes the importance of local markets will go a long way toward building a global brand and ultimately a successful company.

Ricardo de la Blanca is Founder & CEO of DLB Group, a global marketing services integrator and the first independent non-conventional ad network with presence in the U.S., Spain and Latin America. The staff includes experts in the areas of commercial architecture, SMS, Web design, PR, trade marketing, broadcast and print production among others. DLB Group (www.dlbgroup.com) creates impactful plans that support the message between different media bringing memorable experience and brand contact to the consumer.  The company has offices in the U.S., Spain, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Venezuela and Panama.

By Holt Hackney

Whoever said content is king had a point.

There is no quicker way to build a community of clients, prospective clients and potential partners than by collecting and generating practical and compelling articles and blogs.

It used to be that creating a community through content generation was an expensive proposition. Designing lay outs and printing a newsletter could be cost-prohibitive. Technology has changed all that. Today, clients, prospective clients and potential partners will visit a compelling resource if it is online. They will engage and more likely than not act on what they see.

So how do you expand your current Web presence to create an effective online community? There are several considerations.

Find the right person for the job. Communities are effective when they are managed or at least written by a professional with a strong journalism background. Ideally, that person should have experience managing other journalists or expert contributors. This professional is even more valuable if they also have a foot in the corporate communications world. Therefore, they understand the practicality of setting and achieving the publisher’s marketing objective. The most effective managing editor is a professional who can dance in that sliver of the communications world where readers get valuable intelligence and are encouraged to act on that information by buying the publisher’s products and solutions.

Develop a thick skin. So what happens if a competitor wants to publish an article in your community? Welcome them. Just make sure they understand that the community is not a place to overtly sell products and solutions. They can include their email address and website at the end of the article in their bio. Why should you include their contributions? First, it tells your readers that you are an objective resource and that builds loyalty. Second, with an article in your community, you can bet your competitor’s customers will hear about it.  Then they’ll bookmark your site and join the community.

Socialize. Utilize social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter as a way to both build alternate communities around the subject matter and as vehicles for notification of fresh content. Social networks are here to stay especially as a younger generation assumes managerial roles and purchasing power. But make no mistake, a Facebook site without an online community lacks credibility. Yes, it is cool to let everyone know that a story was written in some other online community on a topic of interest, but Facebook lacks a back-end when it comes to generating sales of products and solutions. Not so with a properly configured online community.

Holt Hackney, the managing editor of B2B Buzz, has created more than two dozen online and print communities over the last 20 years. Several years ago, he authored an article about the effective use of corporate newsletters and magazines -- http://www.bizjournals.com/austin/stories/2003/09/15/smallb3.html. He can be reached at hhackney@hackneycommunications.com

By Tom Pisello of Alinean

In order to achieve success, B2B marketers are currently using social media to better connect, dialogue and collaborate with prospects, customers, advocates/influencers and partners.

But what best practices can be used to best drive more engagements and deeper relationships?

We at Alinean recently concluded research of the Fortune 500, and select small/medium-sized businesses across a range of 31 different industries to determine what level of engagements these firms were achieving (or failing to achieve), the required investments to garner success, and the ultimate benefits these investments were yielding.

The research looked for engagement best practice, and found that marketers who implemented a layered, hierarchical set of engagement best practices, including a successive layering of Content, Campaigns, Monitoring and Collaboration, achieved superior ROI results.

Much like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, each successive layer of these practices, relies on a solid foundation of prior levels for success – finding those that implemented a higher level strategy without having a proper foundation achieved much less success and squandered their social media investments.

The Social Media Hierarchy of Needs is the term we have applied to these best practices, and the tiers consist of the following:

• Tier 1: Content
  
• Tier 2: Campaigns
  
• Tier 3: Monitoring
  
• Tier 4: Collaboration
  

If you don’t have anything important to say, or information of value to deliver to your community, you won’t achieve successful engagement with users. Therefore, the foundation of any social media campaign is a good content marketing strategy providing the community with value-added communications and deliverables.

Content that is most effective today includes (in priority order):

1. Value-focused including discounts, special offers, giveaways and calculators,
   
2. Entertainment including contests, games, applications, videos, music and cartoons,
   
3. Ideas such as recommendations/advice, webinars, white papers, diagnostics and articles,
   
4. Credibility including 3^rd party research reports, articles and white papers,
   
5. Personal connections, especially with celebrities, pundits, influencers and thought leaders.
   

Users won’t know that the content exists without campaigns, a promotional “push” of content via the social media channels. Campaigns involve coordinated social media communications to connect to and engage new prospects or existing customers, leveraging content as the value-add to entice and support engagement.

Some campaign examples can include: 

• Posting “deal of the day” promotions to Facebook fans,
  
• Scheduled tweets to promote a live webinar from a thought leader,
  
• Research summary tweets to promote research findings and important white paper content,
  
• Syndication of a blog post to LinkedIn Groups to gain new connections and spur discussions.
  

Above the campaigns, monitoring is required to actively listen to and dialogue with the user community. Monitoring involves sales and marketing actively participating with the community via social media channels, to reinforce and cultivate relationships with existing community members, and proactively gain new relationships with additional prospects, customers and partners.

The monitoring can include:

• Answering questions or queries about the company or products,
  
• Assuring that campaigns are achieving the expected goals, driving the right responses, reactions and results,
  
• Monitoring for positive sentiment and use for promotion to gain additional followers, or monitoring for incidents/issues and negative sentiment to help mitigate these issues and limit risks,
  
• Listening for competitive mentions or requests, engaging users who might be considering competitive solutions,
  
• Providing feedback to fine tune campaigns and content to meet user needs.
  

With so many resources available beyond employees, the most innovative companies are driving ideas, innovative improvements, and partnerships via dialogue with the social media community – a term we call Collaborative Innovation.

As opposed to the “push” oriented focus of traditional campaigns or the “pull” orientation of monitoring, collaboration is an interactive dialogue with followers, connections and fans for mutual benefit.

Collaborative Innovation is engaging with prospects and customers via social media to provide interactive ideas, reviews, feedback and input around:

Product Improvements, termed “Social Sigma” by Forrester, such as market opportunity, features and benefits, design, pricing and more, including:

• Marketing Research, replacing focus groups with social feedback to test offerings, slogans and marketing ideas, and pricing.
  
• Business Development, such as advice on go-to-market, channel or strategic partners
  
• Operational Advice, such as seeking and gathering advice on operational process improvements, procurement, and suppliers.
  
• Crowd Sourcing, using the community versus traditional providers for services or solutions, such as using the community to develop the next advertising spot.
  

Along with the hierarchical tiers, the research indicated two key additional supporting best practices, highlighting the importance of:

• Measurement of social media metrics, benefits and success, in particular tracking of engagement, influence and trends as well as success metrics such as benefits and ROI. 
  
• Integration of information, such as passing of lead information to lead nurturing systems and existing customer dialogue to CRM solutions, and processes integration, such as centralizing and coordinating social media marketing governance and resources.
  

Achieving value from social media efforts requires the user community to be attracted and engaged. To drive the most effective engagement, a set of best practices has been researched revealing a hierarchical roadmap to engagement success. Implementing each successive tier of the Social Media Hierarchy of Needs can help B2B marketers drive more marketing success and ultimately ROI from their social media efforts.

For more information and resources on Social Media ROI, please visit: http://www.alinean.com/socialmediaroi.aspx

By Lilia Shirman

When customer relationship management (CRM) gained attention in the 1980s, it was a technology category. Over time, CRM matured into a set of business practices and attitudes. Today, we are seeing a similar wave of innovation in technology and the way businesses relate to customers. This one is called 2.0. While the landscape of 2.0 communities and technologies is still young and evolving rapidly, its impact on customer expectations is already clear. Customers demand greater vendor transparency and increased influence over what is sold to them, where, and how. They also exercise greater collective and individual power in the marketplace.

The new mindset will not be constrained to online interaction or to B2C markets. Just as with CRM, corporations will need to adopt new mindsets and processes to engage customers interactively and collaboratively. B2B companies that can redefine the customer relationship from one of buyer-seller to that of a collaborative team will command greater loyalty and higher average prices.

The mindset and practices that make customer collaboration possible are achievable with or without IT investment. In fact, jumping too quickly into the technology aspects of collaboration can create huge roadblocks to change. Social media and interactive marketing require investment and resources. If these are made before the company is ready for the transparency, power-sharing, and responsiveness that collaboration demands, those early investments are likely to be wasted. Once they are, it will be that much more difficult to convince executives to try it again.

So what does a collaboration mindset look like? Here are some old beliefs to abandon and new ones to adopt that signal a true acceptance of a mindset ready for customer collaboration.

Old: We know best.

New: The customer is as smart as we are.

You may have the newest and most cutting edge products, and lots of ideas about how they’ll help your customers. Unfortunately, innovative companies often believe that customers “just don’t get it,” are “late adopters,” or are “too risk averse,” to benefit. They tend to assume that the customer is passing up obvious benefits for unjustifiable reasons.

A company with the new belief, on the other hand, understands that customer operate under constraints and as part of complex systems. Their decisions are rarely made out of incompetence. More likely, customers are considering a broader set of factors when assessing value. Rather than write them off, take the time to really understand what’s holding them back, and to gather their input on how to make the product more attractive.

Old: They want us to have all the answers.

New: They want us to understand the real questions.

No one likes the salesman who carries on with his pitch, oblivious to the fact that what he’s selling is irrelevant to the listener. Yet many companies create marketing pitches and sales programs to do exactly that. The most common complaints by decision-makers involved in B2B purchases are that sales people don’t understand their business, don’t listen, and can’t clearly articulate the value or relevance of their product.

The truth is, customers purchasing complex products want to know that you understand them, their company, their environment, and their priorities. Collaboration starts with listening to enhance that understanding. Take the time to understand individual customers’ specific situation and what questions and needs the hoped-for solution will answer. Only then can you work with the customer to create a solution with tangible and unique value.

Old: My customers don’t go to Facebook and Twitter.

New: Collaboration can happen anywhere.

B2B companies are holding back on investing in social media-centered marketing due its thus far low ROI for B2B sales. They also recognize that while consumers may turn to social media for product recommendations and peer reviews, corporate buyers are much less likely to do so.

Postponing social media, however, doesn’t mean companies can’t increase interaction with customers in other ways. Collaboration can and should be an aspect of almost any traditional sales and marketing and tactic. At trade shows, webinars, and sales presentations, greater interaction can lead to significant insights and higher sales.

Old: It’s too hard to train my salespeople to do open-ended interactions.

New: Collaboration is the most natural way to sell.

Collaborating with customers on defining solutions is often called “consultative selling.” Many sales and marketing leaders lament that large portions of their sales channel are simply unable to execute this highly complex sales approach. It’s true that as long as sales reps must rely on scripts written by someone else, they cannot wander far from a closed-ended presentation.

Yet collaborative sales techniques like asking questions, actively listening, and using white boards instead of canned presentations are capabilities almost any salesperson can master. A conversation is more natural than a presentation. It simply requires a different approach to educating the sales team. Focus on the context within which the purchase decisions get made and how your solutions fit within that context, rather than simply on the detailed “features and benefits”. Proving the context frees sales reps from canned spiels and allows them to have natural and constructive interactions.

(The following has been excerpted from “42 Rules for Growing Enterprise Revenue,” by Lilia Shirman. Shirman is the Managing Director of the The Shirman Group (www.shirmangroup.com) and can be reached at lilia@shirmangroup.com)

Photo by Tim Hipps

 By Robert A. Geller

Despite rumors to the contrary (mostly from over-eager social media zealots), the press release remains a staple and important tool in the marketing and communications arsenal.  

Press releases were originally conceived as vehicles to get information out through the news media.  However, today, through the miracles of Internet, Google and press release distribution services, more press releases get more exposure online and allow companies to communicate directly with a wide range of audiences: their local communities, customers, investors, partners and job seekers.

Ideally, announcements are written in a news style and update the world on a company (and its products, services and operations), telling where it has been and where it is going.  Press releases and the overall PR effort should support the brand and the organization's broader objectives. 

However, many do not understand the proper role of the release, and hence fail to use this tool to its greatest potential.  E.g., they under-communicate announcements, or err on the side of issuing too many empty releases.

The following is a list of common errors and misperceptions that contribute to ineffective use of press releases.

Failing to Have a PR Strategy and Plan

Press releases should fit into the broader PR strategy and be a part of the mix of tools and tactics.  Ideally, there will be a variety, and they will - both individually and collectively - tell a story, hopefully one that shows forward movement for the business in the marketplace.  

Issuing Too Few or Too Many

The mistakes to avoid are going quiet for too long, or erring on the side of "press release-itis" and issuing too many.  What is the right frequency of press releases?  The correct answer depends on the company and marketplace it serves - how noisy is the playing field, and how fast-paced is it?  Is the company in its early stages or has it reached maturity?  E.g., at Fusion PR, we often advise our clients (most of which are B2B tech companies) that at least one per month is a good number, as a very rough metric.

Underestimating the Importance of the Press Release

An extension of the above is that some believe that press releases are a waste of time, and should only be used when there is really big news.  They over think their press releases and procrastinate.  My post Revenge of the Press Release countered the mostly social media-driven backlash against this form of communications, and cited facts that prove that press releases remain important for PR.  Amidst the din of social media and the Web, press releases are one way to help your information rise to the top - they package it into a pseudo-news format that gets favored by the search engines and into many news portals, assuming some newswire distribution service is used (see below).

Let's Not Announce it because It is not Really New

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, did it really make a sound?  And if your product, service, or company has been out there for a bit, but was never formally announced, did it make noise with the media?  

I am not big on existential questions, but am pleased to report that there are do overs allowed in the world of PR.  If you never formally announced your company or product, it is usually not too late to do so - it just helps to wrap some fresh information (such as a product upgrade or new company direction) into the release to justify calling it news.  

Striking the Wrong Tone (Flunking the "Is it News?" Sniff Test)

Perhaps the single biggest mistake is to strike the wrong tone and use press release as an extension of sales or advertising.  Toning down the hype language can ensure that your press release is picked up in more places.  The more it looks, sounds and smells like a real news article, the greater the chance that it will get picked up and published.

Assuming it is Just About News Coverage

On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with including a reasonable number of self-promotional press releases into the mix.  Some might counter that announcements about awards and marketplace momentum don't matter to anyone beyond the company, and its friends and families.  While the media will not likely write articles about the "news," the main point here is that press releases are about more than media coverage; they help support efforts to build mind share.  They remind the market, including influencers like media and industry analysts, of the great work your company is doing.  Those tracking the industry may well see the announcement and file it away subconsciously, even if it is not written up in an article.

To Wire or not to Wire

I almost always recommend putting press releases on the wire, i.e. using a newswire distribution service when budget allows.  There are a wide range of services - some are free, most of the better ones charge fees.  As I said in my post 41 Cheap or Free Press Release Distribution Sites, it is a simple fact that you get what you pay for in this area.  Paying for one of the top services, like PR Newswire, Businesswire, or Marketwire, will ensure that your press release gets the broadest possible distribution.  Google and other search engines favor newswire content, and including links back to your website can help boost search engine ranking.

Sending and Praying

Some assume that simply using a wire service and / or manually blasting the news out via email is all that is required to get attention and coverage of the news.  In the PR field, we call this the “Send and pray” syndrome.  Unfortunately, unless you are a large, publicly-traded company, or are otherwise well known, work needs to be done to draw attention to the news, generally via phone and email follow-up.  There is enough to say about getting coverage for news to justify another article; suffice it to say, you should use a PR firm or internal staff to follow-up with reporters and explain why the news is important and relevant to their readers.

In summary, the press release is an important part of the PR arsenal.  When used correctly, it can support your broader PR, marketing and businesses objectives.  Ensure the right mix and frequency of press releases, give them the care and attention that they deserve, strike the proper tone, use a wire service, and you will be well on your way to achieving the best possible results.

Geller is a Senior Vice President at Fusion PR and author of the blog Flack’s Revenge (www.flacksrevenge.com). He can be reached at bob.geller@fusionpr.com 

Kent Huffman, the CMO at BearCom Wireless, vividly remembers the day several years ago when Ed Lallo, the photographer he hired for a corporate photo shoot, offered to show him how to use Twitter.

Huffman watched, learned, acted on the information.

Today, he is one of the most followed practicing CMOs on the Internet with more than 20,000 followers.

He also is the founder and co-publisher of the Social Media Marketing Magazine, which he hopes, with the help of a little social media marketing, will become THE resource for social media marketing.

Given his passion for social media marketing, we here at B2Bbuzz felt it appropriate to place a call to the Dallas-based executive and talk social media marketing. What follows is the byproduct of that interview.

What is the most common misconception about social media among marketers?

I often hear marketers say that social media marketing is free. Unfortunately, it’s not. Although many companies and organizations have successfully leveraged social media for marketing purposes, they had to invest financial and/or human capital in the process. As with any other marketing initiative, there can be hard costs and soft costs associated with social media marketing initiatives, as well as opportunity costs. So it’s not free, but it can be very cost-effective if planned and managed properly.

Which social media channels are generating the most success stories for marketers? Does this differ in B2B vs. B2C?

The two primary channels that have generated the most buzz lately related to social media marketing success stories are the communication channel—blogging, microblogging (e.g., Twitter), and networking (e.g., Facebook and LinkedIn)—and the multimedia channel—video sharing (e.g., YouTube) and photo sharing (e.g., Flickr and Photobucket). Especially over the last few months, the use of video in social media marketing campaigns has continued to grow and will most likely become more popular than any other application.

Even though they continue to gain ground, many B2B marketers still lag behind their B2C brethren when it comes to social media marketing. But by tracking and understanding the relative successes and failures of the more visible B2C brands on social media, B2B marketers can leverage that knowledge to their advantage by emulating the best practices developed by—and avoiding the common mistakes made by—the B2C community.

What standards/metrics are most commonly used to define “success” in social media marketing? What should social media marketers be measuring or monitoring that many aren’t?

In the early days of social media marketing, success was most often defined in terms of the number of followers or friends. But most marketers soon learned that surface-layer stats like followers and friends don’t necessarily relate to success. During the social media maturation process that’s occurring today, more significant metrics are emerging as the standards, such as the level of engagement, the depth of relationships, ROI, and ROR (return on relationships).

In my view, the customer lifetime value (CLV) derived from social media marketing efforts is the most important success measurement of all. But ironically, CLV is the one metric that’s most often overlooked by social media marketers, probably because it can be somewhat difficult to accurately calculate.

In your opinion, what’s the most impressive social media marketing campaign in the past year? Why?

A number of prominent B2C and B2B brands were very successful with their social media marketing efforts in 2010, including Zappos.com, Ford, Red Bull, Domino’s, JetBlue, Dell, UPS, Forrester Research, United Linen, SAP, and Intel. Some of the common threads throughout those endeavors included the fact that each organization made a commitment to humanizing its brand, communicating openly and honestly, and actively listening to customers. Dell even launched a “Social Media Listening Command Center” to help it more closely engage with customers and prospects.

Specifically, the “Old Spice Guy” social media marketing campaign—which focused on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter as the primary delivery tools—certainly helped set the bar pretty high last year. It is widely recognized as one of the most successful social media campaigns of 2010 and is credited with generating a 100%+ increase in Old Spice product sales for Procter & Gamble. Pretty amazing.

What are the top three social media resources that you regularly rely on?

• Social Media Marketing Magazine: http://www.SMMmagazine.com (my digital publication)
  
• Mashable: http://www.Mashable.com/social-media
  
• Social Media Today: http://www.SocialMediaToday.com
  

http://www.KentHuffman.com