B2B

Blogging can generate great results for your firm like increased traffic to your site, a greater number of Web leads, and establishing thought leadership in your industry. While this is true, there are a number of common challenges that B2B firms face in achieving blogging success. Here, we break down these challenges and mistakes and offer ways to overcome them.

As 2012 approaches, it is clear to see that social media should be a focal point in your B2B marketing plan and strategy. Social networking sites can be a great way to connect with potential prospects as well as peers in your industry, plus these sites are incredibly useful for furthering your content marketing initiatives and driving traffic back to your Web site. Although B2B companies often receive a bad rap for being slow to adopt social media, we hope that by now you have hopped on the bandwagon and are enjoying the benefits of social media marketing. If that is the case, you should also be aware of common social media sins that B2B marketers are known to commit. Check out our list of B2B social media sins and learn how you can avoid these faux pas.

This post is a guest blog post by Neil Edwards, Managing Director, Strategic Marketing Consultant and Co-owner of The Marketing Eye, a provider of outsourced marketing services in Uckfield, East Sussex in the United Kingdom.

If I had a pound for every time I’d heard someone say: "we tried marketing once and it didn’t work", I could have retired long ago.

Not only does the phrase betray a lack of understanding of what marketing really is, it is often a reliable indicator of how the fateful marketing programme will have been run in the first place.

Despite many advances in knowledge and information sharing, marketing remains one of the least understood of the business disciplines. Shrouded in mystery, and slippery in its accountability, it is a topic that everybody has an opinion on and most people believe they can do better than the marketing department.

Mobile is new, rapidly evolving, and for some the idea of change is simply daunting. Will your company be prepared with mobile-ready strategies and marketing efforts?

In years past, there was a perception mobile marketing was for B2C; but the time has come for B2B to join the mobile revolution.  In 2010, 64% of B2B decision makers read their email via mobile devices such as a smart phone or tablet.  Mobile has become a legitimate platform to showcase your business.  In fact, decision makers on the move (especially in service industries) often need to get information quickly; they can and do access your site with mobile devices.  If your web site isn’t optimized for mobile use, you may be making an impression that’s not great.   To keep up with mobile client needs, B2B marketers need an executable mobile marketing strategy.

Blogging has become a mainstream “voice” but for many B2B companies, it’s a huge hurdle to get started in the blogging arena.  We’ve all  been there.    Fortunately, more and more firms are getting over the initial fear. 

Often, “bloggers-to-be” start breaking the ice by commenting on other blog sites to gain some comfort and find their voice.   Then you publish a few posts, wait for comments and are met with….silence.  Not getting comment participation might get discouraging, however, (especially in the B2B marketplace) it’s quite normal.   Don’t worry, your efforts aren’t going to waste…as long as you put some effort into building your audience.   

We all want our posts to be noticed, read and appreciated, so we need to get them in front of the right audience.  Here are some ways to use Social Media to build your audience:

What is Paper.li?

Paper.li is a free online Web tool that allows you to create your own newspaper generated from the content of your Twitter and Facebook   accounts.  It takes the links from people you follow and organizes them into a virtual paper made for easy reading.  There are 4 ways to create a newspaper from your Twitter feed.  Each “newspaper” is constructed based on a topic of interest (for example: health care facility design) and your audience.  Below are the 4 ways to create a Paper.li through Twitter and Facebook.

From Le Tip and BNI International to chamber business card exchanges and tweet-ups, how do B2B professionals know where to invest their time?  For many of us in professional services, including lawyers, engineers, accountants, management consultants and marketing consultants, time is money.  How you spend your time and what the return on that investment of time becomes pretty darn important.

Closing out March and continuing with our promise, the Marketri team is bringing you the monthly top 3 marketing tools.  Each week we’ve chosen a new and effective tool to help you put into practice within your business.  Keep in mind, these tools are always available weekly on our Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn pages.  Our tools this month range from social media monitoring to web-based recordings and even a question and answer database.  We’ve dabbled in a little bit of everything in the past few weeks!  So with that said, here are our 3 favorite tools for March:

Well, the Eagles played football on Tuesday night, and ended up losing to a Minnesota team who was starting their third string Quarterback, so I guess anything is possible.