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.

As marketers, finding yourself behind the competition is the last place you want to be. When it comes to social media, corporate marketers no longer have an excuse for being the last to know. Today, not being up to speed on the latest news or trends in your respective industry gives your competition an edge.

There’s a lot of great content written about our respective industries every day that’s worth passing along to readers, who may not follow the same resources (websites, bloggers or industry influencers) that you do. This creates an opportunity to leverage your corporate blog as a communication channel that others can turn to to get the latest buzz and educate themselves on important industry topics. Doing so helps build thought leadership for your organization, a key objective for any corporate blog.

But merely passing along information is not enough. To build credibility, your content needs to be topical, engaging, innovative and timely. Another critical part of all this is becoming part of the 24/7 social media mix, adding to the ongoing conversation by providing your perspective on the day’s top stories.

As bloggers, it can be difficult producing enough fresh marketing content every day. The best way to become part of the mix is to blog or comment on other news stories out there. Linking to other articles won’t increase your SEO, but attributing or linking to high-profiled stories can put you on the radar of the websites or blogs you link to, as well as help generate more traffic to your website. When you come across a relevant article, here are a few ideas you might consider that can get your blog in the social media mix:

• Provide unique experiences or cite examples that support the story’s content
• Publish internal stats, survey, etc. that support or challenge industry trends
• Tie your corporate message or recent announcements with timely stories
• Expand on specific points or ideas within the article

As marketers, we should always have our creative marketing caps on. The key to creating fresh content is keeping up with the latest buzz and industry trends, providing our perspective on how we can take ideas to the next level. Because, in the end, the last scenario you want is your CEO asking you about some article or industry trend that you’ve never even heard of. As marketers, being the last to know always makes for an awkward situation.

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?

In business, they say you’re only as good as the team around you. That certainly holds true for online content marketers. Trying to do it all yourself, particularly in today’s dizzying 24/7 virtual environment, is impossible. Keeping up with the continuous discussions, coming up with relevant and intriguing topics, and creating regular content is far from a one-person job if your goal is to generate quality material and build a larger readership.

Because the goal of every corporate blog is to enhance your brand, position your company as a credible expert, and ultimately generate potential prospects and customers, guest commentary from other experts in your field can help ease the demanding workload while adding value and credibility to your blog. An industry blog that provides multiple, expert views about topics important to their readers is the type of online resource people turn to when researching issues, products or solutions that solve their specific problems. The recent blog, “Ways to Get Guest Bloggers to Add Content to Your Blog,” provides some nice tips on how to attract other experts in your respective field to contribute to your corporate blog.

The way I see it, leveraging multiple expert opinions can only enhance both the quality and quantity of your online marketing content.

This is how I did it with iMovie, and some of this information will be specific to that, but generally this should apply to other editing software as well. With that said, here is what I did.

Equipment:

• Computer: iMac running OS X Snow Leopard
• Video editing software: iMovie ’11
• Image editor: Pixelmator, but I have also used Photoshop

Process:

• Step 1 Generate a PNG: Get logo in proper format. You need a PNG of your logo, not a JPEG, PDF, or other format. The reason you need a PNG is that it will only show your logo with a transparent background.
• Step 2 Create it in the proper aspect ratio: In order to drop your logo in simply in your video it needs to have the same aspect ratio as your video even though the background is transparent. I have two versions of my logo, one for widescreen HD video (1,280×720) and one in standard (640×480) ratio. This will prevent cropping of your logo or black bands from appearing when the whole logo is shown.
• Step 3 Drag your logo onto your iMovie project: When you do this, you will be presented with options of how to insert this image into your video. Choose Picture in Picture to have it overlaid on the video.


Select Picture in Picture for your iMovie

• Step 4 Fit your image to the video: Select your new Picture in Picture image in iMovie and edit it (in iMovie you can just press “c” once you have it selected). Once in editing mode choose “fit” to make sure that your entire logo is selected.


Select your logo





Choose Fit your logo in iMovie

• Step 5 resize your logo and position it: Dragging the corner of your newly inserted logo allows you to make it bigger or smaller in your video and then you can position it in your video appropriately.
• Step 6 imbed your logo across your video: I choose to have my logo show up from the beginning of the video to the end, but you can just have it show up in certain sections of the video if you choose.

Example of logo in video on FounderBuzz

I hope this helps. I’m sure that I’ve left things out so be sure to post if you have any questions.

If this is indeed the case, what can we learn from publishers that will help us become better brand marketers? Well, here’s a few thoughts.

Write to your audience: Any niche magazine knows its audience. They know their interests (which is essential for attracting advertisers), they know industry trends and their readers’ problems and concerns. Instead of touting their products and services, publishers produce and deliver content that caters to the specific needs of their audience, not their own.

Provide meaningful content they can use: Part of the reason people subscribe to magazines or industry journals is to educate themselves and gain deeper knowledge from experts about a particular subject. The same applies to someone researching information online. In most instances, they want to keep up with industry trends and hear what credible experts have to say about the problems they’re dealing with and available solutions.

Think like an editor: My partner at Mindlink Marketing, Scott Olson, wrote an excellent article entitled, “Need sales leads, think like an editor,” that highlights key strategies for leveraging social media for lead nurturing. The bottom line is delivering interesting, relevant content not only establishes a connection with your readers who remember you when they are ready to purchase, but builds your brand in the eyes of consumers.

So, whether you’re blogging, tweeting, advertising, refreshing your corporate website, or pushing new, downloadable content in the form of webinars, whitepapers or case studies, brand marketing is becoming more and more about publishing. Heck, even the oldest marketing activity — word-of-mouth communications — has gone viral. As I wrote in a previous blog, “How social media enhances the customer experience,” social media allows marketers to establish their brand, build stronger relationships with their customers, and immediately fan out the flames when disgruntled customers express their opinions across Twitter, Facebook, or some other online social community.

This is why brands are getting serious about becoming media companies, which according to Pulizzi’s article, is the direction many leading marketing experts believe content marketing is headed in 2011.

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.

]]> http://mindlinkmarketing.com/2010/12/facebook-advertising-tips-b2b-companies/feed/ 0 http://mindlinkmarketing.com/2010/12/you-don%e2%80%99t-have-to-be-an-ambulance-chaser-to-produce-valuable-blog-content/ http://mindlinkmarketing.com/2010/12/you-don%e2%80%99t-have-to-be-an-ambulance-chaser-to-produce-valuable-blog-content/#comments Sat, 11 Dec 2010 00:29:16 +0000 Stan Carlberg http://mindlinkmarketing.com/?p=1451 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.

I’m not saying you need to become an ambulance chaser who scours the Internet for any story that matches your top keywords. If the story is not relevant to your readers, it’s probably not worth writing about. Any attempts to bridge your company with a hot story that’s not relevant to your readers can be viewed as a vain attempt to take advantage of a particular situation. However, when a timely story is relevant and you can provide real value to your target audience, that’s when you’ve struck blogging gold. Providing your perspective on a hot topic, and linking to that story, can significantly increase your blog traffic.

The approach is fairly straightforward. Take a little time each week scanning articles related to your industry. Talk to others in your company about potential angles or perspectives that bring a fresh perspective to the hottest topics in your industry. Lending your knowledge and expertise on subjects important to your readers can provide real value they can use when trying to resolve specific business challenges. In other words, chasing more qualified blog traffic doesn’t require you to become an ambulance chaser on the Internet. All that’s required is delivering relevant content that’s valuable to your target audience.

]]> http://mindlinkmarketing.com/2010/12/you-don%e2%80%99t-have-to-be-an-ambulance-chaser-to-produce-valuable-blog-content/feed/ 0 http://mindlinkmarketing.com/2010/11/how-social-media-enhances-the-customer-experience/ http://mindlinkmarketing.com/2010/11/how-social-media-enhances-the-customer-experience/#comments Fri, 12 Nov 2010 20:46:20 +0000 Stan Carlberg http://mindlinkmarketing.com/?p=1431 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!

The reason businesses are taking notice stems from the idea that if someone with 1,000 followers writes a negative review about a company, 1,000 people will believe whatever is said about the company. Social media enables businesses to provide instantaneous customer service that can help curb problems and enhance the customer experience.

Because of these types of stories, organizations are beginning to catch on. In a recent survey by communication agency Cone, 86% of consumers now connect with companies on new media, an 8% jump from last year. As more and more businesses are building a presence on new media sites, corporate marketers should be forewarned about the increasing interest in brand engagement via new media.

Mike Hollywood, Cone’s director of new media, said “the best new media strategies are those that balance relevant content with timely promotions and ongoing company-consumer dialogue.”

With 59% of respondents saying they make purchases with companies they engaged through new media, it’s becoming increasingly clear that businesses should be making it a priority to include social media in their corporate marketing strategy to provide the level of customer service needed in today’s digital age.

]]> http://mindlinkmarketing.com/2010/11/how-social-media-enhances-the-customer-experience/feed/ 0 http://mindlinkmarketing.com/2010/10/if-you-love-writing-headlines-you-really-gotta-read-this/ http://mindlinkmarketing.com/2010/10/if-you-love-writing-headlines-you-really-gotta-read-this/#comments Fri, 22 Oct 2010 22:59:51 +0000 Stan Carlberg http://mindlinkmarketing.com/?p=1414 I love headlines. It’s really that simple. I love reading them, love creating them, and I love to edit them. I have to say coming up with an engaging headline is one of my favorite things to do. I see headline writing as a very calculated puzzle of words that, when done right, can double your readership. Not in the way that those trashy supermarket rags do so well, but in a way to connect businesses with their target audience.

While the process of writing headlines for your B2B marketing materials is both fun and challenging, writing an effective one is not as easy as you would think.

The goal of every headline, of course, is to grab the reader’s attention. If your headline doesn’t make a good first impression that motivates your readers to want to read more, don’t get me wrong your article will still be read, but not by as many readers as you had hoped for. But a well-written headline that strikes a chord with readers can significantly increase the amount of readers that are compelled to read on. And for your B2B marketing and lead generation programs, that’s a beautiful thing.

For B2B headlines, there are a few things that are critical in capturing the attention of your audience, and they primarily revolve around benefits. Capturing the value or how the reader will benefit from the article, whitepaper, blog, etc. can greatly improve your ability to expand your readership. When writing your next headline, here are a few things to think about:

Readers eat up numbers: Nothing excites people researching products or services like reading about the financial benefits they can receive from your products. Including hard numbers, percentages or any statistic that instantly shows how your readers can improve their bottom line will make a great first impression on any readers.
Highlight pain points: Businesses trying to solve problems are always looking for experts that understand their space, their top concerns and pain points. If you’re able to squeeze in your headline specific terms that keep them up at night, they will most certainly read on.
Be straightforward: Trying to be too clever with your headlines can sometimes work against you. If readers don’t understand your wit or dry sense of humor you can lose them, or not make a connection at all. Also, don’t create misleading headlines that promise one thing, but deliver another. With the limited amount of time people have to research materials, being straightforward with what they can expect is always the best way to go.
Keep it punchy: While great headlines can vary in length, keeping it short makes it both easier to read and gets straight to the point. There’s a funny term I learned in journalism called energy leaks, which basically describes unnecessary conjunctions such as “that”, “but” or “so” that deflate the energy or power of your stronger adjectives. In other words, if any word in your headline doesn’t strengthen your point, get rid of it. Your headlines should only include words that excite and influence your audience to read on.

Feel free to share any of your favorite B2B marketing headlines or stories about how a specific headline eventually led to new business. I would love to hear them.

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