Social media has become a significant part of serious marketers lead generation strategy.
Companies who engage in social media increase their reach massively. And there is no matter if they are B2C or B2B.
Social media is public communications channel where companies can get great unfiltered feedback.
Companies need to understand that social media is not for “pushing your messages out “.
To be successful and to reach a positive ROI with social media, companies need to communicate and to listen to their audience.
It is simply untrue when someone claims that his customers are not active in social media. They are active in B2C and B2B and they research online for products and services.
The only question is: What will they find when they research for products and services you also have to offer, will they find you or your competitor?
Studies prove that B2C and B2B profit likewise from social media engagement.
A study from Wildfire Interactive shows that social media helps grow brand awareness, increase sales and partnerships and helped to reduce marketing costs.
Engaging in dialogue with customers via social media has become an important part of successful companies.
Smart marketers measure the value of social media channels as well. They want to know which one has the best results for their business. One of the most popular channels is Facebook. About 44% of surveyed marketers say that “Facebook is valuable because they help with new customer recruitment”.
Moreover they have stated that Facebook fans have higher conversion rates and they make more frequent purchases.
How can you measure the ROI of your social media marketing?
• At first you can do this by increase of your revenue
• As a second way you can measure are “Likes”
• You can measure social media mentions of your brand
A great way is to add lead capture pages to your in social published articles and to track the traffic, leads, lead to customer rate and revenue per generated lead. So you get a good picture of your cost per lead and adjust activities to increase your profits.
Studies show that companies which relying on online lead generation are two times more profitable than those who do not. Those companies achieve an up to 62% lower cost per lead.
LinkedIn is now permitted to use your name and picture in any of their advertisements. So they can use this throughout their whole network for their marketing purposes!
First - You can forbid it by change your privacy settings this way:
1. Place the cursor on your name at the top right corner of the screen. From the small
pull down menu that appears, select “settings”
2. Then click “Account” on the left/bottom
3. In the column next to Account, select the option “Manage Social Advertising”
4. Finally un-tick the box “LinkedIn may use my name and photo in social advertising”
5. and Save
Or, the Second possibility –You can use this as an opportunity to let market LinkedIn your business throughout their whole network for FREE! Simply let them do the branding job for your business and paying not a dime for this!
How does this sound for you?
Here is how it works:
You simply change your photo to a branding tool! Use your photo by inserting your brand LOGO how I have done here with my LinkedIn photo. That’s it.
Now LinkedIn is very welcome to use my photo throughout their whole network as long as they want.
I only can say THANK YOU LINKEDIN for this tremendous FREE marketing opportunity and God bless you!
By the way, you can do this on Twitter, Facebook and other networks as well.
— Let me know what you think and how your results are.
In the beginning of the internet it was a source of information and today entertainment and shopping have accompanied this attitude. But research is still the main factor when it comes to web use.
Before social media people went mainly to search engines to research and to find products and services. Today in times of social media the products and services find them through discussions, content sharing and recommendations from friends and followers. And even on the road these information are accessible through mobile devices.
This evolution of information technology also arrived to the B2B companies.
The search volume on Facebook has overtaken Google. And there are not only consumers who research there. B2B is also using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and other social networks to research for products, services, industry related information and new business partners.
Nobody says that a product or service with a volume of hundreds of thousands of dollars has to be sold on Facebook. But the first contact can be made there and the further discussions and negotiations can be took offline to close the deal.
Social media is a great way to showcase a business and to offer a more personal insight view. A company has great opportunities to show personality to attract the right buyer persona and to get in touch with the right new future customer when this one is looking out for products and services.
All social media sites also have mobile apps; their reach also spreads wider and is working 24/7. Not only teenagers are surfing on social networks through their mobile devices. B2B decision makes do this as well and their number is increasing!
How can you and a B2B firm leverage this information above for your business?
1. Start a social media presence. Complete your profile there.
2. Research for industry related B2B groups and people. Become a member and invite those people to your network.
3. Listen to their discussions. If you have something valuable to contribute than do it, otherwise go on listening.
4. Start a corporate blog. Write about topics your B2B audience is interested in. Share your blog articles in social media and ask for feedback for your publication.
5. Build landing pages and offer exclusive and valuable content for download. So you generate laser target high quality industry related B2B leads.
The Social Media marketing return on investment is a major factor why businesses choose to step into social media marketing and the two communications here.
Social media has proved in the past years that it can bring positive ROI when done right. Some successful examples are Intrepid Travel, Easy Lunch Boxes,SnapRetail just only to name some of them.
As businesses understand that social media is no short term sprint than more something like a marathon they engage with more diligence to plan their steps to reach a long term ROI.
Successful brands look at social media engagement as a plant which needs to be cultivated over the time to grow to an unlimited range.
BzzAgent has discovered that about 61% of brand advocates would buy products up to one year after social media campaign has expired. This proves that social media marketing and two way communication lasts longer than ordinary one marketing blasts from yesteryear.
This does not mean that social media has become a “push the button cash machine”. Not every campaign will be successful. But like everything on the planet the volume of activities and their step by step improvement ensures a growing success.
This does not mean that brands should fire one campaign behind another. This means that a brand should carefully listen to its audience. When they listen carefully their audience will tell them which campaign could be appreciated to become a possible success story.
In the mean time a human and authentic communication should be the priority.
A good way to start a smart dialogue is to ask open questions. To ask the audience about their opinion about services and products will open discussions where a brand get the opportunity to respond in a professional, authentic and human way.
No matter if there are critics or praise. Every feedback is a chance to showcase the brands standpoint and get in touch with the recent or future customer.
Brands that listen to their audience and improve products and services to fit their audience’s needs are one step from that to be the long term winners. The growing trend for custom products proves this. The one size fits all strategy does not work anymore this is for sure!
Any business can use social media as a source of unfiltered information and as powerful business intelligence tool to predict trends, for support and product development.
The others who do not will be left behind, and they deserve to vanish because they do not care a shi* about their audience and never have. Social media also points this out and separates the good from the bad once.
In this new world the customer B2C and B2B wins and the brands who care. And that’s good!
In the beginning of 2012 the traffic, unique visitors and time on site of some smaller sites like Tumblr, Pinterest and Google+ increased and attracted attention from marketers.
The audience of smaller sites can be of big marketing value for marketers as there are not overwhelmed of information like on the bigger ones.
Marketer can gain attention quicker and lead more qualified and quality traffic to their sites to convert them to leads.
This increased lead quality could also reflect in an increasing lead to customer rate.
With better lead quality you save time and money when you convert them to paying customers. Maybe your lead count decrease but the quality increases and you grow your revenue the smart way.
In the past years eBay is an established platform to buy and sell goods. Millions of people day visit eBay to research and to buy products. Hundreds of thousands of businesses utilize eBay to get new customers and to make revenue.
But there is another side of eBay. Increasing fraud, increasing sales and listing fees and the decreasing image value of eBay.
But there is good news for businesses. Ebay is a traffic machine when it comes to target traffic. Moreover the eBay traffic is laser target.
How can you use eBay to lead a ton of laser target traffic to your business? Because this is the only way how you can profit from eBay in the long term, when you build your brand not theirs!
Here are eight easy steps how you can squeeze out eBay traffic and increase YOUR profits:
First: You should change your mind and not use eBay of your primary source of business. This decreases your sales and listing fees and focuses your audience to your website and the listed offers.
Second: When you are listing your offers on eBay you should ALLWAYS include your website and your blog URL in to your listing, so your audience get the chance to visit your website.
Third: Only list offers on eBay as special offers, do not list them in your website and shop at the same time, so the visitors can’t compare. Use eBay to introduce new products for a short time and then only offer them in your shop.
Fourth: Design your website and shop in greater marketing strategy in mind and build it as marketing hub to canalize your traffic to leads and your leads to sales.
Fifth: Build your own email list to keep your audience updated. Include a call to action to your audience to subscribe to your newsletter on your website, so you own your list.
Sixth: Setup a lead nurturing process to keep your audience informed, but do not bother them only with sales offers. This leads to higher unsubscribe rates.
Seventh: Start a corporate blog to open a two way conversation hub for your audience to build trust, position yourself as a credible source and to publish remarkable content.
Eighth: Start a facebook business page and add Facebook special, especially for your FB fans. Start a Twitter and add special offers for your Twitter followers.
These steps above ensure that you build your brand in the longer, drive a massive amount of traffic to your website, generate a ton of business leads and increase your revenue and sales and decrease your dependence of eBay and your eBay costs.
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Free report: Get found and get leads the smart way.
Every business wants to succeed. But not every business is doing what it needs to succeed. As for the past years corporate blogging and social media has increasingly earned popularity because auf its successful use, there are still a majority of businesses which still do not engage in these said marketing opportunities.
During the past years inbound marketing, which consists of strategic and buyer persona oriented content creation and content distribution like corporate blogging, engagement in social media, lead generation and lead conversion through lead nurturing and measurement through closed-loop analysis has grown in popularity.
The increase of inbound marketing popularity is no fad but the outcome of measurable and proven results which studies like the MIT study certifies.
Some examples why inbound marketing is so successful:
Content creation
Companies who operate a corporate blog and update it frequently have 55% more website visitors. 57% of companies which operate a corporate blog report to have acquired new customers through their blog.
Social media
67% of B2C and 47% of B2B companies report to have acquired new customers through Facebook. 47% of companies who use Twitter report to have acquired new customer through it.
Lead generation
Inbound marketing has a 62% lower cost per lead than traditional marketing strategies. Inbound marketing way generated leads have an 55% higher lead conversion rate than lead generated through traditional marketing strategies.
As inbound marketing strategy consists of buyer persona oriented content creation, social media engagement, lead generation, lead nurturing and closed-loop analysis; it covers the necessary areas for a successfully operable strategy.
Some suggestions to jumpstart your inbound marketing:
2. Produce remarkable content (blog articles, whitepapers, eBooks, photos, video, press releases and FAQs) for your buyer personas.
3. Distribute your content online through your corporate blog and in social media.
4. The more you publish and share the better. As you increase the amount of pages of your website and blog articles you get increasingly more digital outpost to get found better online.
5. The more articles you publish the more opportunities appear to get Backlinks from other websites and blog who also like your publications and you will be recognizes as a trusted source.
6. Build relevant landing pages and clear call to action to generate leads.
7. Nurture those leads with important information and not with sales pitches.
8. Measure what you do, optimize and repeat.
Infographic: Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing
—What do you think about inbound marketing?
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Content Marketing has become a significant part of online marketing strategy. Content Marketing has proven to be the best and most cost effective way to drive traffic to a company website and convert this traffic to leads and customers.
The most popular ways of Content Marketing are blogging, social media and video. Studies show that 57% of companies which operate a corporate blog get customers through their blogging effort!
4 Reasons to start a corporate blog:
1. Blogging companies get up to 55% more Traffic
2. Blogging companies get up to 97% more Inbound Links
3. Blogging companies get up to 434% more indexed pages in search engines
4. Blogging companies get up to 25x times more business leads
Social Media Marketing has become a powerful tool to spread remarkable content to reach a wide audience.
For companies who engage in social media and show presence in these channels can open wide opportunities to get in touch with their audience. This leads to an increase of credibility and unfiltered feedback of the target audience and can lead to an improvement of products and services.
New studies show that up to 65 percent of today’s consumers expect a brand to listen and to respond on questions, comments and complaints in social media. Studies also show that companies which use social media actively to communicate with their audience are more successful than companies who do not.
7 Reasons to start your social media marketing:
1. Increase customer perception in the marketplace
2. Build long term relationship with customers and partners
3. Can respond to customers in real-time
4. Taylor products and marketing campaigns based on customer preferences
5. React and resolve on negative buzz in real-time
6. Decrease costs of marketing
7. Improved time to market for products and services
Most people think they need to be Steven Spielberg to make a video to put it online to get a positive impact for their business. But this is not true.
You do not need fancy equipment. The only thing you need is a video camera and for the beginning it can be the one from your smart phone.
The most successful video examples come from ordinary people who could not even be considered amateurs. To become successful with your video marketing, with video content, there is only one secret: Just go and do it, do as many video as you can. Publish it and let your audience judge.
6 Reasons to start your video marketing:
1. 200% to 300% more monthly unique visitors
2. 100% longer average time-on-site per visitor
3. 3-minute average time spent on pages with videos
4. 157% increase in search engine traffic
5. 100% increase in unique visitors
6. 63% increase in page views
Infographic: Content Marketing
—What do you think about content marketing? Are you doing one or all three or other content marketing strategies?
Mobile is on the rise. The evolution of technology which companies like Apple and Google have powered has produced new experiences how people find products and services.
People surf from their mobile devices like smart phones and tablets about three hours a day compared with one hour from their desktop PC.
People are connected on social networks like Twitter and Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare and other location based services that show them best locations in their area. They rate, check in and check out of their popular locations. There are apps available who show you how to mix a cool cocktail and which houses are for sale in a street.
The things have developed to a new level of communication. This leads to the question when people have their apps activated and are on them, will they additionally take the effort to open a web browser to research? More likely they will not.
The trend shows that search engine search traffic will decrease and companies who are active on location based services will get an increase of traffic as people use them preferable.
Infographic: Local Mobile Search
For a business this means to get engaged on those social networks and services which already are very popular and have mobile apps active. This is the way to get in front of the future customers.
Infographic: Mobile Marketing
Some tips how to profit from the increasing mobile trend:
1. Optimize your website to be accessible from mobile devices.
2. Also a business should start to collect mobile phone numbers to enable their mobile marketing.
3. Adjust the email marketing and the email messages to be easy readable from mobile devices is also a good strategy.
4. Build your digital outpost and get engaged in social media, in location based services and rating sites.
5. Develop your own mobile app to stay in touch with your audience directly.
Summary: With this above activities you can significantly improve your visibility in 2012 and attract more future customers to your business.
—What do you think about mobile marketing, did I miss anything?
The study shows that businesses with up to 100 employees are more willing and more active in the use of the new technology opportunities. They actively embrace marketing ways like website optimization, email marketing, paid search – PPC marketing, social media, search engine optimization SEO, marketing automation and virtual events – webinars.
The study also shows that businesses with more than 1000 employees are relying more on trade shows and print advertising. But compared to businesses with up to 100 employees they use less website optimization, email marketing, paid search – PPC marketing, social media and search engine optimization SEO.
There is nothing wrong to use tactics that work. But it is a failure to not develop those tactics to improve them to be more productive in the today’s technology opportunities.
To reach the today’s B2B buyer you need to be there where they are. It is a proven fact that B2B business can be initiated through personal meetings on a trade shows. Also it is a proven fact that B2B business can be initiated through connections in social media. Now calculate which way is more cost effective!?
The graphic above shows a big difference between the up to hundred employees firms compared to the more than thousand employees firms. This could be that the smaller firms need to be more cost effective with their marketing than the larger ones. And therefore they use any creative way to get in touch with their target audience.
Here is the competitive advantage where small businesses can get market shares from the big ones but for the fraction of their costs.
Smaller businesses can increase their online activities through inbound marketing. An MIT Sloan Study found out that inbound marketing has a proven 62% less cost per lead and up to 55% higher lead conversion rates.
Inbound marketing is the marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers when they research online for products and services your business also has to offer.
With inbound marketing businesses earn their way to the customer, by publishing helpful information on a blog, in social media and forums.
Inbound marketing includes Blogging, Social Media, Lead Conversion, Lead Nurturing and Closed-Loop Analysis.
Inbound marketing increases brand reach and recognition, makes a business stand out of their competition and increase your customers and sales.
Marketing tip: Small businesses should focus on lead generation online. The best way to attract target buyer persona is to produce, publish, distribute and market content on the web. This can be done through a corporate blog, eBooks, whitepapers, pictures, video, social media conversations, blog commenting, press releases and by building further digital content epitomized outposts like Squidoo.
—What do you think about B2B online lead generation?
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Today customers no matter if the are B2C or B2B are overwhelmed with information and offers. This makes it very hard for a business to stand out and to get found online for their future customers.
The increasing competition and the decreasing marketing budget make the recent situation and the future outlook more difficult.
Businesses who want to be and to stay successful need to rethink and to reposition their strategies.
It is not enough anymore to be there. Moreover when you are there, but not where your target audience is around than you are nowhere!
What makes a business to stand out of the crowd and secure their share of the market in the long term?
Like anything humans do there are several ways to achieve goals. One thing is try and error. This takes time and can consume a lot of budget. The other thing is to do it like you have done in the past, because it worked “in the past”. But what worked in the past is not necessarily working in the future. Or you use a proven system which has demonstrated thousands of times that it works and is able to bring in positive ROI.
Such proven marketing system is inbound marketing.
What’s inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing is the marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers when they research online for products and services your business also has to offer.
What’s does inbound marketing help me to do?
With inbound marketing businesses earn their way to the customer, by publishing helpful information on a blog, in social media and forums.
What does inbound marketing consists of?
Inbound marketing includes Blogging, Social Media, Lead Conversion, Lead Nurturing and Closed-Loop Analysis.
The MIT Sloan Institute found out that businesses which use inbound marketing are more successful than businesses which do not.
B. Makes a business stand out of their competition
C. Helps to generate a massive amount of business leads
D. Helps to get up to 55% higher lead conversion rates
E. Helps to increase customers and sales
To jumpstart your own inbound marketing system just starts with a corporate blog and publish remarkable and share worthy content. Distribute this published content on the internet and in social media. Measure your results, improve your doings and you are on your track to success.
Today it is crucial to be active in social media to make your business more visible and this is no secret.
As major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are indexing social media content the chances increase for businesses to get found online when they publish remarkable content and distribute this content to social media where it can be shared and commented.
With the last step to start +1 button and Google profiles and pages for companies Google has opened a other opportunity for businesses to get their content indexed and improve their SEO the social media way.
When visitors of your content click the +1 button than anybody in their network can see what they like including their profile picture next to the +1 vote. Also its the same way with published content on Google profile and business pages.
When you have already shared your published content like blog articles, pictures, video, etc. on social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and others then you get a further powerful opportunity with the +1 button which you should use to become more visible.
How can you start to use Google + profile and page for your business?
A. If you have a Gmail account than go and register your Google+ profile and complete it. Insert all necessary information and customize your profile. Take care to use long tail keywords in your description.
B. When you are done with your personal Google plus profile than establish a Google business page. Insert all necessary information about your business. Take care to use long tail keywords in your description her as well.
C. Now let your friends know about your Google+ presence and invite them to your circles.
D. To step into conversation publish your content, information in your updates and ask for opinion. Comment on others updates and share them through the +1 button.
Your action and activities will drive awareness of you and your business and hopefully lead interested people to your blog, website and your offers.
Furthermore you got an additional chance to improve your visibility in the search engines through social SEO.
There are 6.8 billion people on the planet. 4.5 billion Own a mobile phone.
Gartner Group predicts, that by 2013 the number one way people will access the internet will be through their mobile devices.
70% of all mobile searches are acted upon within an hour vs. 30% of all traditional searches.
With mobile marketing you deliver your message directly to your customer. It’s like you spoken directly to him and he listen carefully what you say.
There is no question, if you are not active mobile than you miss large opportunities to make customers aware of your business. Take action before your competitor does.
Infographic: How Online Marketing Drives Offline Success
Domino’s iPad App: Makes & Delivers Custom Pizza
Starbucks Cup Magic
Custom iPhone Application for Restaurants
Presentation: Mobile Trends and Strategies
Infographic: Dining and Restaurant Reservation Trends
15 things you can do to empower mobile restaurant marketing:
1. First of all, claim your business in the appropriate social media platforms and location-based applications.
2. Mobilize your website and start using mobile media for your business.
3. Start collecting mobile phone numbers from your customers and organize them in a database so you later send personalized SMS to them, to inform them about specials and news.
4. Use QR Codes for promotions.
5. Reward your first-time visitors
6. Change deals often to stay attractive.
7. Promote group check-ins. The more in a group, the better the deal
8. Interact with customers. Make them accomplish a small task (Origami napkin) to redeem
9. Promote to those checking-in nearby
10. Encourage interactivity
11. Keep yourself updated about mobile media and trends.
12. Design a Smart Phone app for your business. (like the one from Starbucks or Domino’s)
The inBlurbs Inbound Internet Marketing blog covers all of
inbound marketing - SEO, Blogging, Social Media, Landing
Pages, Lead Generation and Analytics.
Social media has become a significant part of serious marketers lead generation strategy. 
