B-to-B Facebook 101: How to Create an Effective Business Page that Generates Sales Leads
Digital marketing success requires much more than a corporate website. That’s why blogging and social media are taking a lead role in today’s brave new marketing landscape – and Facebook has become a marketing hot spot for B-to-B companies. Whether you’re looking to generate sales leads or expand your existing customer relationships, a B-to-B Facebook page can help buyers find you when they’re researching products and services. According to a 2011 marketing study by Penton Media, 90% of B-to-B marketers are active on Facebook. A 2012 survey by Mindwave Research also revealed that 61% of respondents who buy complex technical products are most influenced by communications with colleagues – and that
B-to-B Internet Marketing: How to Optimize for Mobile
Mobile platforms are becoming more of a consideration when it comes to B-to-B Internet marketing. If you are trying to market on the mobile web, you need to consider the importance of creating entertaining and quality content that users can easily consume on mobile devices such as smartphones or tablet computers. Optimizing for Mobile Users Mobile marketing is being tossed around frequently in marketing circles, often with many different intended meanings. While mobile marketing can mean many things, there is one primary message being conveyed for marketers looking to take advantage of mobile: Optimize for mobile devices. While developing a mobile application relative to your business is another option, most businesses are still
B-to-B Internet Marketing: How to Nurture Leads with Email Marketing
According to industry research, 70% of your leads will end up buying something from you or one of your competitors, but they won’t do it right away! Companies that use B-to-B Internet marketing to build relationships with their leads over time have the greatest success in turning leads into customers by staying top-of-mind until the lead is ready to buy. Lead nurturing is the process of developing that relationship with your potential customer by sending targeted, relevant and valuable messages to them in a timely manner. The end goal is to get your leads to “raise their hand” and self-select into further engaging with your business. Here are some email marketing
B-to-B Internet Marketing: How to Convert Site Traffic into Leads
Using the first four blog posts in our B-to-B Internet marketing series, you should have already launched your blog, optimized your site for search engines and started promoting your content via social media. If it’s been several weeks, by now you should start to see a spike in traffic to your website. There's only one problem. All that traffic to your site isn't leading to any new business! People are visiting your site, but those visits aren't leading to new customers – or even new sales leads. So what do you do? Simple. Focus on conversion. Focus on converting more of your website visitors into sales leads. To do this, decide on a
B-to-B Internet Marketing: How to Create a Great Company Blog
Blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger have made publishing content on the web easier than ever. Once you have developed a clear understanding of your business’ keywords and optimized your website for search engines, the next step in your B-to-B Internet marketing strategy should be to attract more visitors. Blogging and creating content like ebooks and webinars are powerful ways to help more of the right people find your business online. How to Think About Business Blogging When thinking about blogging, take off your hat as a marketing manager and instead try to think like a magazine publisher. The goal of your business blog should be to publish articles that are not promotional but
B-to-B Internet Marketing: How to Participate in Social Media Effectively
Social media is generating a lot of buzz right now among marketers and B-to-B Internet marketing practitioners. Marketers who can leverage social media to help distribute business content and increase the overall community of advocates for their business can experience significant growth. Social media allows your customers and potential customers to communicate directly with you and your employees online, and it allows interesting content to spread quickly. While new social media tools launch every day, most businesses really only need to focus on the major players: Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Monitoring Social Media An important part of leveraging social media for business is to understand what conversations are happening online related to your
B-to-B Internet Marketing: How to Search Engine Optimize Your Website
In last week’s blog post on B-to-B Internet marketing, we explained how to choose appropriate keywords for your company. Now, we’re going to help you increase your website's chances of ranking for those keywords using search engine optimization (SEO). To help prospects find your company via search engines, you should aim to be on the first page or in the first few search engine results pages for your keywords. Google suggests that you design your website for visitors, and not for search engines. While you should keep this principle in mind, it is worthwhile to learn a bit more about SEO in order to better optimize your site. What You Should Know
B-to-B Internet Marketing: How to Create a Keyword Strategy
With traditional marketing methods becoming more ineffective – and expensive – than ever, savvy B-to-B marketers are placing increasing importance on Internet marketing. However, succeeding in today’s ever-changing online landscape requires you to develop an effective B-to-B Internet marketing strategy to promote your company on the web. If you wanted to boil Internet marketing down to a single starting point, keywords are it. A keyword is a word or phrase that a person enters into a search engine like Google or a social media site like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Why Build a Keyword Strategy? More and more consumers are finding businesses online through search engines. How do they find them? By using
B2B Inbound Marketing: The Facebook Effect
During the last few years, everyone has thought about how to retool their business for a very different marketing world. Until recently, everyone followed the same formula to make some marketing noise: Sending out press releases, running full-page ads in the preferred industry bible and attending key industry trade shows. But, customers today are trusting colleagues, not marketers or media. They value conversations, not monologues. They want content, not brand messages. That’s why using B2B inbound marketing techniques – such as blogging and sharing your posts on a Facebook business page – is a much more effective way to reach your prospects. In fact, our partner HubSpot studied data from 4,000
How to Analyze Your Business-to-Business Sales Cycle Marketing Strategies
How long is your sales cycle? What does it look like? Has your marketing team used the answers to these questions to realize smarter, more successful outcomes? As business-to-business marketers, we tend to devote considerable energy to executing programs that accomplish a single, discrete strategic goal, such as building brand awareness, launching a new product, promoting sales and so on. Care is taken to create rich, integrated marketing initiatives to effectively achieve these objectives. However, we are less likely to schedule these programs to work as a cohesive whole within the context of the external marketplace and the dynamics of the sales decision-making process. If a marketing organization fails to target decision-maker behavior