Archive for the ‘Startup Marketing Strategy’ Category

It’s long been said that everything is connected, and there’s no better example of that than the digital world. In fact, a recent study by a Facebook data curator found that social media has cut the so-called “Six Degrees of Separation” idea by a few degrees. With billions of people around the world communicating online, today’s marketing professionals need to take note.

As technology evolves, our immensely popular remote electronic devices connect us like never before. More than that, they are increasingly becoming our preferred means for communication, entertainment, shopping and research. This is something all corporate marketers need to consider when developing their corporate marketing strategies.

While creating fresh and engaging content is critical to generating interest in your products and increasing your website traffic and search engine rankings, doing so without leveraging today’s highly effective, cost-efficient social media tools that can instantly touch your audience is like shutting the shades on your many marketing windows to the world.

B2B marketers need to understand that when it comes to developing a marketing communications strategy, combining your daily marketing content with social media and all other marketing and public relations campaigns is essential to delivering a cohesive and consistent message that reaches your audience across several platforms. In other words, confining your message to your website or a newswire service alone can dramatically limit your exposure to thousands of potential prospects and customers who prefer various ways to receive their digital information.

To increase the success of your marketing campaigns, today’s marketers need to leverage the many different marketing tools and social media platforms that are readily available. Repurposing your marketing content in blogs, electronic newsletters, and social media tools like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn can help raise your brand awareness, better educate your prospective customers about who you are and what you do, and increase your chances that your important company announcements and daily activities reach as many people as possible.

The great thing about social media is that it levels the playing field for everyone. No matter how small your marketing team is, integrating your key messages with social media allows you to compete with companies that have larger budgets and more internal marketing resources.

Startups unsure of which social media tools to incorporate into their marketing strategies shouldn’t get intimidated or overwhelmed by the amount of tools out there. Instead, they should continue to add new social media components to their marketing arsenal. Sure, modifications will be made along the way as you figure out what’s working and what’s not, but not leveraging social media will only put your marketing team at a competitive disadvantage.

The bottom line is, with the world becoming more connected through technology, it’s becoming more important than ever that marketers combine their corporate communications, public relations and social media strategies in today’s digital world.

Each day, online marketers are regularly writing and publishing fresh content that, for all intents and purposes, will both educate and intrigue readers, or at the very least, generate discussions around relevant topics that everybody’s talking about. Along the way, building credibility through your expertise, unique perspective and insight is critical to making your blog one of the industry’s must reads for the latest buzz and commentary.

As one of your company’s online content developers (or maybe the only), coming up with regular content can be a challenge. Staying on top of your respective industry’s hottest topics requires a lot of ongoing research and thought, which can seem like a full-time job in itself. So, how can you keep up with minute-by-minute online dialog and develop timely material without sounding passé or completely going out of your mind? (more…)

24
Dec

Facebook Advertising Tips for B2B Companies

written by Scott Olson

I just had a great conversation with my good friend JT Keating, VP of Marketing at CoreTrace, talking about their experience with Facebook advertising and I have to admit it was impressive. Their ability to target the right demographics for their ads and generate click through on their promotion was impressive at a reasonable cost.

Here were some beginning tips he had on how to get the most out of this kind of advertising:

  • Know what your customers would like. If there are groups on Facebook that your ideal prospects would like you can display ads specifically relevant to them if there are enough fans of the page to generate clicks. Look for groups for your industry like security, cloud computing, etc.
  • Know your customer demographics. You can target by geography, age, sex and other demographics in a much more targeted way than you can with typical search marketing.
  • Target your ideal customer companies. Facebook allows you to single out employees of companies you would like to see your advertisement.



  • It is extremely interesting how easy Facebook makes it to target your ideal customers and I will be looking at this in much more detail in the new year. If you have a good or bad experience with Facebook advertising I’d love to hear it in the comments.

    Have a great holiday everyone.

Over the past few weeks, there have been millions of blogs written about WikiLeaks. Rightly so. It’s the hottest topic on the planet. But why are so many people blogging about it? What’s the motivation? I figure there are two reasons: First, they want to get in on the conversation of the day. Second, and what might very well be the driving force behind the first, tying their content with timely material will drive higher blog traffic.

While commenting on popular topics can potentially drive more traffic to your blog, as B2B marketers, it should not be the driving force behind your content development. From a sales and marketing perspective, if your material is not attracting your target audience your efforts will be all for naught, no matter how much you increase your blog traffic.

The strategy for any corporate blog should be to deliver valuable content to your target audience, whether it’s educating them about a relevant topic or generating interest in a solution that solves their problems. This works for both lead generation and lead nurturing programs. While discussing your customers’ business challenges and demonstrating how your products or services solve their problems is relevant material for your readers, attracting a broader audience sometimes requires all little creativity such as getting into the mix of timely stories that are relevant to your industry. (more…)

12
Nov

How social media enhances the customer experience

written by Stan Carlberg

As many companies are beginning to learn, social media is much more than building your brand and selling products and services online. It can also be used to protect and manage a company’s reputation.

Recently, there have been a number of articles about how social media helps businesses connect with customers and quickly resolve customer complaints before they gain momentum across the Internet.

In the article, “Turning to Twitter to fix restaurant complaints,” the popular food chain Chipotle describes how a customer Tweeted on the spot their disappointment that a Fort Worth, Texas, location didn’t have corn tortillas. Chipotle, which has employees dedicated to social media, immediately had the Denver, Colo.-based corporate office call the local manager about the situation before the customer even left the restaurant. Now that’s customer service! (more…)

18
Oct

5 tools to measure competitive marketing

written by Scott Olson

Marketing when done well always has a healthy dose of analytics and feedback. Understanding the impact of your marketing efforts is critical in determining where to allocate your budget and time. One area that can be particularly illuminating to both your management team and board is around competitive marketing. Understanding how you are doing relative to your competition can provide valuable feedback on your own and your competitor’s progress.

Here are six tools I like to use to gauge how companies are doing relative to competition with their marketing initiatives:

  • Compete – One of the best sites for measuring competitive marketing is at compete.com. They started as a site that allowed you to analyze website traffic across multiple sites, but have evolved into much more. They provide tools to help you measure search analytics, referrals, keyword analytics, and a wealth of marketing tools. This is definitely one of the most useful competitive marketing analysis sites I have found.
  • (more…)

Relationships are the currency of the modern economy. Wow! When I read this in the article, “What’s the ROI of a Business Relationship?” it really got me thinking about how companies market themselves, and how business is really all about relationships.

Today’s warp-speed business environment seldom allows any time for B2B companies to really get to know their customers beyond the mutual interest of doing business. The daily pressures of sales and hitting our quarterly numbers keep us at such a rapid pace that we really don’t get to know our customers the way we should — as people. Sure we’ve been to their offices and we understand their business issues, but how well do we really know them?

The new book, It’s Not Just Who You Know by Tommy Spaulding explores the importance of business relationships in what he refers to as Return on Relationships (ROR). It’s an engaging concept, to say the least. (more…)

I was out shopping the other day and I came across this car in the parking lot. A Hummer Hybrid in it’s full ecologically conscious glory. As a marketer, I think there is no greater crime than marketing your products to an audience who doesn’t want them.

In this case, Hummer built their product for the wrong group and failed to understand their brand. The Hummer brand is built on gas guzzling excess. Trying to suddenly change directions and market to energy conserving, environmentally conscious groups was bound to fail.

This is an extreme example, but could you be doing the same thing? See if any of this sounds familiar:

  • Do you send emails to your sales database without segmentation?
  • Do build features to meet new market needs instead of prioritizing the needs of your true fans?
  • Do you build a generic website that doesn’t speak to the specific needs of your primary audience?

Take the time to understand your value and your audience. Lots of companies say they are applicable to a broad horizontal market, but often this is evidence of the company not wanting to take the time and make the hard choices to decide who they really are selling to.

It’s better to delight a smaller group and grow from there then try to please everyone. That is a sure path to failure.

As marketers we’re always focused on the message. What do we want to say? How can we make it more engaging? While we are constantly tweaking the message, how often are we communicating these ongoing changes to the sales team? Weekly? Monthly? Quarterly? Dare I say…

Aside from your marketing campaigns, your sales force is the front line of your company. They are out in the field talking to your customers and prospects, following up on the leads you’ve provided them. Because of this, it’s critical that both sales and marketing are on the same page. If there’s a disconnect in what each party is saying to customers it can impact the success of your campaigns and the ability to close sales. (more…)

A while back I detailed how I was recording and transcribing interviews using RecordiaPro and Mechanical Turk and it turned out to be one of my most popular posts. It is still searched on quite a bit as transcribing audio files is a problem that many people are looking to solve. Speechpad may change the way I do things.

Speechpad is a new service I am trying out that I came across on the Mixergy site, another great resource for startups. The Speechpad website is straight forward and simple. As you can see from the image I captured off their website above, they offer three different services; uploading a file, recording a call, and phoning in a note. Here are my thoughts on these services: (more…)

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