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.

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.

As marketers, we’re always trying to keep it simple. We know that if the message gets too convoluted, it can impact how the industry perceives your brand, not to mention the success of your campaigns.

I once worked for a niche company that did a few things great. As a result, they quickly earned a stellar reputation within the industry. Their clients trusted them so much that they begin asking if the company would take on additional services that were outside the scope of their core offerings. To make their customers happy, the company invested in the resources and began offering the new services to other customers. Over time, however, they couldn’t deliver on the expectations for the additional services. As a result, they began to lose the trust they initially earned with their clients. Then they realized, instead of being a jack-of-all-traits, they needed to reel things back in and rescaled their service offerings. They got back to what they did best.

The moral of the story is to focus on what you do best.

While your company’s product offerings will expand due to mounting pressures from shareholders and the growing competition, the key to handling these marketing challenges is to always focus on the strengths and value of what your company does. I’ve provided a few thoughts on what marketers should focus on when the company is growing.

If you are designing a new website, be sure that your final site can answer these five key questions to visitors:

• What do you offer? – Don’t be cute. It is essential that you plan your content strategy to clearly identify what it is you offer to customers. This is important for search marketing as well as ensuring that people that do find their way to your website stay and find out more. Use industry accepted terms for both the category your product is in and the customer problem you address.
• What is unique about your product or service? – Once a visitor to your site knows what you offer, the next question is what makes you different. Your key differentiator that you sell on should be front and center in your content. Don’t use generic terms or terms you can’t back up like “leading vendor”.
• Who can vouch for your product? – Ideally you should highlight other companies or customers that are using your product. If you are just starting out you can also use quotes or briefs from analysts or press about your product. This is your reference check for the website.
• How can I find out more about your company? – Usually a prospect needs more than one visit to your website to become a customer. Your website ought to have additional information that they can download like a whitepaper, dynamic content from a blog, and links to allow an interested prospect to stay in touch with your company. Links to your social media accounts, RSS subscriber for your blog, and a signup for a newsletter are all effective ways to nurture visitors to your site who may be ready to buy in the future.
• How do I buy from your company? – Calls to action to contact the appropriate individual responsible for sales should be readily visible and available on every page of your website. Don’t bury your call to action in your company or contact page of your website. All home pages and product pages should have an easily identifiable link where people who are interested in buying your product or service can contact you.

Creating your corporate website is an ongoing process that involves regular work, maintenance and a well thought out plan for your web content. Make sure your website is answering the right questions for your potential customers.

Do you sell into different industries? Tag posts appropriately and design your industry page to pull the appropriate posts into a featured side bar.

Posting about product updates, feedback or features? Link those posts to your product page.

Your blog can be used in so many ways to create relevancy for your prospects, partners and customers. The content you create on your blog can be some of the most valuable web content you have because of its currency and relevancy to very specific topics. Whether you use it to nurture leads with email marketing, or to drive fresh web content, look for ways to use your blog across your business goals and you will make the most of your investment in this important marketing asset.

1. New rules of thought leadership marketing.
2. Careful planning key to keeping sales lead’s attention over time.
3. 5 hints for maximizing drip marketing results.
4. Don’t just produce web content; think it.
5. 5 common content marketing challenges – and simple solutions.

Seth makes some good points and should make people question the metrics they use to measure marketing success like web traffic, clicks and eyeballs on the site.

“The majority of people who sign up for a new online service rarely or never use it. The majority of YouTube videos are watched for just a few seconds. Chatroulette institutionalizes the glance and click mentality. I’m guessing that more than half the people who started reading this post never finished it.

This is all easy to measure. And it drives people with something to accomplish crazy, because they want visits to go up, clicks to go up, eyeballs to go up.

Should I write blog posts that increase my traffic or that help change the way (a few) people think?”

More than ever there is a call to action for companies and their marketing departments to build valuable, strong connections to their customers and prospects. In essence they need to move away from the sheer numbers game and focus instead on quantifying high-quality interactions and relationships they build with their audience.

One of the biggest challenges for organizations today is understanding what tools to invest in that will give them the best return on their marketing investment. Even with more efficient communications and social networking applications popping up overnight, many organizations continue to stick with what worked for them in the past. Unfortunately, the ROI for a lot of traditional marketing programs continues to dwindle from 2% to 0.001% to nil. That’s a lot of time, energy and capital spent for very little return.

Today, too many marketing and sales dollars continue to be thrown into programs that result in large databases of unqualified leads and lost opportunities due to a lack of effective outreach or inadequate follow up, which brings me back to MindLink’s lead nurturing strategy. I look forward to bringing my web content and corporate communications experience on board to help our clients deliver more engaging and informational content that provides value, industry insight, a better return on their marketing investment, and ultimately creates more successful, long-term relationships with their customers. I can’t wait to get started.

Rather than generate another in a long line of posts of how to do this, I thought I point to a great example of someone doing this right now. Seth Godin is promoting his new book, “Linchpin“, and is leveraging his considerable network to get the word out.

In advance of the launch of his latest book, Seth Godin asked the followers on his blog to contribute $30 or more to the Acumen Fund and in return he would send the first 3,000 contributors an early copy to read and review. I signed up for my copy and should be receiving it this week.

This is a brilliant promotion and leverages grass roots support to get the word out about his book in contrast to traditional costly marketing campaigns. Now, Seth Godin is one of the top bloggers on the net and has a huge following, but here are some things we can all learn about his approach to generating buzz for his new book:

• Begin with your fans – Seth began by posting this promotion on his own blog. This is a collection of the people most predisposed to already value what Seth has to say because he knows that they are already reading his blog.
• Use scarcity to create value and generate a quick response – By limiting this promotion to 3,000 copies of his book, Seth simultaneously created a value in being one of the 3,000 and generated an immediate response. By responding quickly, I knew that I would be one of 3,000 people who had a chance to read this book early and post my review. Because there is relative scarcity, I knew that my review would have value to my own blog.
• Make sure participants are invested – Requiring participants to contribute to the Acumen Fund made sure that the people who received the early copy of the book valued it and would be more likely to read and write an advance review of the book. A free promotion would likely yield watered down results.
• Ask participants to talk about your product – The goal in all of this is to promote your product of course. Make it explicit. Seth Godin specifically asked the people who participated to read and review his book in advance of its release.
• Connect participants with each other – Seth Godin and Acumen fund set up an online community for everyone who participated in this promotion and used it to generate anticipation for the book as well as promotion of the Acumen charity.
• Communicate regularly in advance of the review – I have received regular e-mails both from Seth Godin’s team and the Accumen community that remind me about the upcoming delivery of the book so I have set aside the time to review it in my calendar.

I am looking forward to receiving, reading and reviewing Linchpin this week. That said, I think that there is as much to learn from the way Seth is promoting this book as what might be in the book itself. Translate some of these techniques into your own products and think about how they might be used to engage your community in promoting your latest product.

]]> http://mindlinkmarketing.com/2010/01/using-community-to-promote-your-product-a-look-at-seth-godins-promotion-of-linchpin/feed/ 2 http://mindlinkmarketing.com/2009/12/guidelines-for-competitive-positioning-dont-emulate-microsofts-steve-ballmer/ http://mindlinkmarketing.com/2009/12/guidelines-for-competitive-positioning-dont-emulate-microsofts-steve-ballmer/#comments Fri, 18 Dec 2009 06:59:46 +0000 Scott Olson http://blog.mindlinkmarketing.com/?p=577 This is an old clip, but in honor of Apple’s iPhone officially passing Windows Mobile market share I thought it was worth pulling back up Steve Ballmer’s original reaction to the announcement of the iPhone.

This may be one of the worst examples of a CEO talking about a serious competitor that I have seen. The mocking laugh and outright disregard, for what anyone with any foresight could see was going to be a serious competitor, is inexcusable. If I were a shareholder of Microsoft, which I am not, I would be outside Ballmer’s office with torch and pitchfork for forfeiting a 9 year head start in the market to Apple because of lack of vision.

Want to avoid sticking your foot in your mouth? Here are some guidelines for positioning against the competition:

• Understand your market. You ought to have an advantage with a given audience relative to your competition. If you don’t you are in big trouble. Hopefully this advantage can extend to a larger audience over time. Whether your advantage is technological, user experience, cost or another advantage make sure you understand that and communicate that.
• Never underestimate your competition. Don’t believe your own marketing that you have the best solution in the market and that your position is safe. Your competition typically is far more capable that your internal team will give them credit for. Talk to customers where you lost deals to them to get a clearer picture.
• Never belittle your competition. This is the one that I can’t believe that CEO Ballmer never learned. You never win when you do this. Essentially you are saying to undecided customers that they are stupid if they are still considering your competition. Is there any better way to drive away some of the key customers you want to capture?
• Let the market belittle your competition. Looking for the best way to ruin your competition’s reputation? Build a kick ass product. With the advent of social media, crappy products can’t stand the light of day. If you build a far superior product than your competition and engage online with your audience your fans will quickly point out your strengths over the competition without you getting dirty.
• Build a case for the importance of your strengths. If you are competing with a strong competitor, be sure to get out there and champion your strengths as a critical component of a good product in your space and make sure that they really are. Blog, write contributed articles, engage analysts and your prospects in this discussion. Make sure people are looking for products with your strengths.

Competitive positioning is never easy. Be honest, be clear, and be respectful and you will be on your way.

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