Weekly Marketing Blogosphere Recap: Using B2B Content Marketing and Social Media, LinkedIn Launches New Marketing Tools, and More!

April 16, 2012 | by | Category:

In our blogosphere recap we examine four blog posts from last week that discussed how to be successful in B2B content marketing and social media, LinkedIn introduces new marketing tools, ways to market your website, and businesses miss conversion opportunities due poor social marketing engagement. Below are some of the highlights from these articles:

5 Ways to Win with B2B Content Marketing & Social Media

Top Rank Blog | Lee Odden | 4-9-12

In the world of B2B online marketing, content and media have been used in a variety of forms to educate and persuade customers across long buying cycles with great success. Over the past few years I’ve heard from many B2B marketers that prospects are leading themselves through much of the initial phases of awareness, interest and consideration by consuming useful content discovered through social channels and published by the brand.

Key Steps:

  1. Planning. Goals, audience, and approach can allow for social experimentation but also provide companies with some structure and accountability toward achieving business outcomes with social content. Social content plans don’t need to be set in stone.
  2. Prospect Centric. B2B marketers can achieve better success with social content by empathizing with customer needs, interests, goals, and pain points across the buying cycle. As prospect-centric social content gets shared, many of those who engage will refer or become customers.
  3. Give to Get. Provide something of value before expecting anything in return. Deliver useful information, listen to how audiences respond, and make adjustments. Then repeat.
  4. Promotion. Promotion can attract traffic, social shares, and links, which can all serve as useful signals to search engines and improve standard and social search engine visibility. Promotion works best with content that deserves to be shared.
  5. Analyze and Optimize. B2B companies develop social profiles, publish descriptions, and contribute content at various intervals as part of their social media participation. They may actively optimize social content with search keywords and social topics. A missing piece of this puzzle is the importance of ongoing monitoring and analysis.

LinkedIn Introduces New Marketing Tools

WebPro News | Mike Fossum | 4-10-12marketing tool

Marketing content can now be adjusted to industry, seniority, job function, company size, non-company employees and geography, and marketers have access to an insights field, to monitor progress in acquiring new followers, engagement metrics – including likes, shares, comments, and percentage of engagement over time – and reviews of followers’ demographic information.

Key Takeaways:

  • LinkedIn is set to launch its LinkedIn Targeted Updates and Follower Statistics, a more robust marketing and analytics tool, to help brands forge a more effective following in a business context.
  • LinkedIn users who follow company pages are twice as connected as the average member, being in twice as many groups in the network.
  • A recent study has shown that Facebook still holds its own against LinkedIn regarding business to business marketing,

10 Proven Ways To Market Your Website

Forbes | Ilya Pozin | 4-11-12

So, you’ve taken the steps to create your company website…but what do you do now? Now you face the challenge of actually bringing in new, qualified traffic. After all, that’s how you will make more sales and increase your customer base. SEO is the process of increasing your website’s visibility in search engine’s organic results through optimizing your pages with the keyword phrases people are likely to search for. Think about it: when you search for something in Google, do you typically go beyond the first couple pages of results? Probably not, and neither will your potential customers.

Key Steps:

  • Search Engine Optimization. SEO can be a time-consuming process initially, but it’s an important step towards getting more traffic and grabbing a top spot in search engines for your main keyword phrases.
  • Blogging and guest blogging. Offering free, original content on your site can help bring new visitors and set you apart from the competition.
  • Email Marketing. Give people a compelling reasons to subscribe (contests, great content, insider information, etc.) and then continually send great content so they don’t unsubscribe.

Businesses Miss Conversion Opportunities Due to Poor Social Marketing Engagement

Brafton News | Jen DeTracey | 4-12-12

When prospects reach out to a business on Facebook, Twitter or another social platform, they expect interaction. Failing to respond to users’ messages, questions or even complaints defeats the purpose using social media marketing to engage social audiences. While there are tertiary benefits of building a social presence even without allocating resources toward user interaction, such as greater market insights and inbound links through shared content, social media marketing is a two-way communication platform between companies and their prospects.

Key Takeaways:

  • 75 percent of companies have failed to convert a prospect because of missed engagement opportunities.
  • Companies with poor engagement tactics often struggle to retain their customers, which further demonstrates the value of social listening and responses.
  • Using social marketing to connect with clients is often overlooked but critical as it costs up to 15 times as much to get new customers as it does to retain existing ones.
  • More than 70 percent of social users said they follow companies for a number of reasons, including a desire to communicate with them.