Category Archives: B2B Marketing

B2B Marketing

TOP 5 SOCIAL MEDIA TRENDS OF 2010

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Location Based Social Networking

Check out “checking in.” With the advent of smart mobile devices that are GPS-enabled (“location aware”), a whole new class of social networking tools have arose.

Social Gaming and Virtual Goods
Zynga, the maker of the popular Farmville and Mafia Wars software games, is expected to surpass $400 million in revenues in 2010 — up from an estimated $200 million in 2009.

Group Buying
Three years ago, Groupon did not exist. Today, it is a 3,000-person organization with a presence in more than 50 cities around the globe that Google is slated to buy for as much as $6 billion and spawned over 100 competitors.

Facebook domination
In 2010, Facebook users topped 500 million, greater than the population of the many countries combined. Their 2010 release of the Open Graph that allowed users to “like” products, Web pages, and blog posts across the Internet solidified their omnipresence.

Mobile First
According to the Pew Research Center, use of mobile phones for “non-voice” purposes has “grown dramatically” over the last year and more than half (55 percent) of mobile phone users go online from their mobile phone on a daily basis.

source: http://www.kctv5.com/news/26188278/detail.html

SOCIAL MEDIA Related Articles:

Stanford Professor Uses Social Media To Draw Marrow Donors
“When you learn about something from your friends or people you trust through email or Facebook, it’s much more persuasive than a message coming from a corporation or someone you don’t know,” said Aaker, who teaches at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

Aaker is now working with students from Stanford’s Haas Center for Public Service, using social media to get 100,000 people signed up with the national bone marrow registry.

Aaker got the idea from her former student Robert Chatwani, who used social media to find a bone marrow match for his friend, Sameer Bhatia. Bhatia had a 1 in 20,000 chance of finding a donor.

source: http://paloalto.patch.com/articles/stanford-professor-uses-social-media-to-draw-marrow-donors

How Travelers Use Social Media
A survey conducted by StudyLogic for Sheraton Hotels & Resorts examined attitudes toward social media for business and travel use and found that 72.7% of US social network users accessed the sites at least daily while they were traveling. Young adults ages 25 to 34 checked social sites most often, with nearly a third using them multiple times an hour.

Social media use should mirror face-to-face patient dealings
o help walk that fine line, the American Medical Association recently enacted policy that provides physicians with guidance on social media conduct. The recommendations were approved during the AMA House of Delegates Interim Meeting in November.

…

With 500 million users worldwide on Facebook, for example, social media can be a great way to meet your patients and colleagues where they already are, and to spread messages about yourself, your practice and the health issues you care about.

source: http://www.ama-assn.org/amednews/2010/12/20/edsa1220.htm

7 Ways to Use Social Media to Generate Qualified Leads

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1. If Twitter is your social media drug of choice, be everywhere all the time by using hashtags and schedulers

Hashtags: If your event budget has taken a nosedive like many others, use the advanced search feature on Twitter to research what events your competitors and/or prospects will be attending. Be careful not to blast the conference hashtag with commercials but instead post insightful responses and informative resources for the hashtag followers. The idea here is to put yourself in front of a captive audience and drive qualified traffic by sharing thought leadership and educational assets.

Schedulers: In the “How to grow your Twitter following” post, research shows that a vibrant Twitter account updates more than 20 times a day. As a B2B marketer, be direct (use @ replies) and establish yourself as the subject-matter expert in your field (i.e., share educational articles and links in between your branded tweets). To update your timeline about once every hour, try using a free scheduler like Twuffer, SocialOomph, HootSuite, or TweetDeck.

Also monitor Twitter for customer care inquiries and negative sentiment directed towards your competition. If someone is having an issue with your competitor’s product, this is a good time to step in and showcase your differentiators.

Participate in industry Tweetchats. This is a great way to directly engage with prospects, potential partners, and other thought leaders by asking and answering questions related to a certain topic. For a Tweetchat directory listing, start at Twitdom.com. One of its Twitter application directories—“What the Hashtag?”—is a user-editable encyclopedia for hashtags found on Twitter.

2. Use the advanced search feature on LinkedIn to find prospects that fit your buyer persona.

First research the connects and then outreach in a non-aggressive manner, offering your expertise around a specific business challenge of theirs you may have uncovered.

While on LinkedIn, establish yourself as a thought leader by answering user questions. If prospects know you are willing to answer inquiries from the general public, they may be willing to ask you questions directly—which may open up a selling opportunity.

Join a few LinkedIn Groups specific to your industry. These groups help you keep your pulse on the marketplace and in touch with people who share your interests (i.e., who could also benefit from your solution).

3. Use Facebook to establish the culture of your brand

4. Mobile: Use SMS short codes (EX: Text “ELAvate” to 247365) to give prospects a green way to opt-in for additional content. Use it as another touch point and reason to push out differentiators about your brand.

5. YouTube: Increase your search engine ranking + brand awareness online by tagging your videos appropriately. Try connecting your corporate videos to topic-specific landing pages, especially since YouTube is the #2 search engine.

6. Leverage the WOM value on social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious

7. Online Community and Chat

Source: http://blogs.imediaconnection.com/blog/2010/10/26/how-to-use-social-media-to-generate-b2b-leads/

List Your Business Product Of Company Free

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The word B2B stands for the business to business. In which, it involves two companies for exchange. The two companies attach for the intension of business. Like from manufacturers to its global buyers or from manufacturers to its suppliers for the products. So, such kind of exchange between two companies is called as b2b portal.

The B2B portal is a one kind of platform which has members who are manufacturers, suppliers & exporter. The B2B portal provides the platform to its member for fulfill their needs & requirement. By using these online sources retailers are very easier to wear business-to-business, and thus the promise of many benefits to buyers and sellers worldwide.

B2B is on kind of place where all the manufacturers, suppliers and exporters has come to do the business online to meet their global buyers by leads. Especially if we seen Indian B2B portal, it has the Indian market comes as an important marketing tool that is used to provide benefits to each distributor, manufacturer, exporters and supplier. This advanced method of negotiation has helped operators to generate revenue to add to the productivity of their business.

The main advantage of this type of trade is based on its negotiation skills quickly. It can be connected directly to a manufacturer in India, which eliminates the need to employ an intermediary, which ultimately reduces costs involved in each case.

B2B social media is no longer a “nice to know”, it’s a “need to know”.

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A thoughtful, well-executed B2B social media strategy can deliver a number of benefits, such as social proof — extracting external measures of your firm’s, or industry’s, image or success from social network platforms. It can provide significant exposure, engaging you and your audience with the credible transparency of millions of grass roots conversations. Meanwhile, paid and sponsored advertising on these sites can be highly targeted to your consumers. And the functions that drive inbound marketing results, such as search engine optimization or SEO, are distinctly accelerated by the professional use of social media.

To get started, make sure your business clearly outlines its social media goals. These may include revenue, membership, reputation, market share, or other objectives. Once identified,

* Content is always king, especially online; determine how relevant, engaging information will be consistently acquired and generated by your team.

* It’s not expensive to do right but it’s also not free; dedicate the adequate resources and appropriate people to maintain your site and manage your social network interactions at a high standard.

* Decide which online channels will most effectively reach your audience.

* Technology is the gateway; ensure that you have a robust, effective and well-written Web site that supports and enhances your social media strategy.

* Make return on investment a key metric; fully integrate your social media efforts into your sales, growth, and customer relationship management initiatives.

For B2B marketing, social media is no longer a “nice to know,” it’s a “need to know.” Properly designed, well managed, and creatively applied, social media can make a discernible impact on your business goals. It can also serve as a fast and effective tool in responding to diverse crises, handling employee or labor issues, addressing fast-moving investor issues, and quickly adapting to sudden changes in buyer and stakeholder demographics.

Carefully evaluate the potential for B2B social media as an essential element of your company’s strategic marketing program. It will prove to be a seductive, but sustainable, strategy that will keep you from drifting aimlessly in a sea of competition.

Kevin Stickney is a founder of Calypso Communications. He can be reached at KStickney@Calypsocom.com and 431-0816.

B2B email market: 5 Resolutions for B2B E-mail Marketers

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5 Resolutions for B2B E-mail Marketers

As you are wrapping up details of your 2011 planning, take a moment to make these resolutions for the new marketing year:
1. Think about your audience.
We often tend to think about our own needs first, such as more leads or more revenue. This is especially true when economic times are tough. However, driving success in the digital channels depends heavily on building the relationship with your subscribers and then delivering relevant content to them.
The key is to identify the natural segments in your contact base and then create content that is meaningful to these different segments but which also meets your business objectives.

2. Think beyond your product.
We also tend to tout how great our products are rather than focusing on how we can provide a solution to our customer’s business problem.
Think about your answer to the subscriber’s question: “What’s in it for me?” Communicating an effective answer to your audience will help you establish a solution-provider leadership position beyond just the product you’re selling.

3. Think about the customer lifecycle.
Traditionally, e-mail campaigns were sent out on the marketer’s schedule. The newsletter is mailed in the second week of the month. We need leads, so we send out another e-mail to the base.
Today, marketers are starting to realize that the secret to executing high-performing campaigns is to map critical programs to the customer lifecycle. Identify key milestones and barriers to purchase along the lifecycle and build automated programs to address the subscriber’s specific needs.

4. Think multichannel.
It’s new, it’s got the buzz, and it works. Several recent reports are showing that social media and mobile use by B2B sales and marketing professionals is evolving in a similar fashion to that of consumers.
B2B users are now accessing mobile and social channels slightly more often than e-mail. Reinforcing your message across multiple digital channels will extend your reach, identify more leads, and drive more sales.

5. Think quality over quantity.
Marketers often focus on quantity (“How many total e-mail addresses do I have on my list?”) rather than the quality of those contacts. All too often, they tend to blast the entire list with the same message over and over again in hopes that the good leads will raise their hands.
This is the e-mail marketing equivalent of telemarketers harassing you at dinnertime to switch your long-distance carrier. Resolve to focus on boosting your opt-in permission for key segments, and focus on leads or revenue per e-mail as a key metric for the success and efficiency of your e-mail campaigns.

The Final Word: Lack of B2B email market awareness is “unforgiveable”

Cordell Brewer wrote in a post for Biz Community that the impressive results that can be achieved through B2B email marketing speak for themselves and, as such, to be unaware of this growing marketing area is to be behind the times.

He noted: “For a professional marketer or advertising person to be blissfully unaware of a tool that routinely provides a 48-times return on investment is just unforgiveable.”

Mr Brewer added that increasingly creative uses of the medium are likely to come to the fore as more marketing professionals embrace B2B email marketing.

Reference:
Lack of B2B email market awareness is “unforgiveable”
5 Resolutions for B2B E-mail Marketers