Ahh, brand. You want a strong brand, right? A strong brand opens doors for sales. It puts your company on the short list.
What Comes After Lead Generation?
Two weeks ago, I wrote Five Reasons Lead Generation is on its Last Legs, exploring the reasons why today’s common lead generation tactics are beginning to fail. However, the requirement that marketing deliver leads will not change.
Marketers need to move beyond today’s content for contact information exchange and embrace new ways to drive demand and capture more interested and qualified contacts. Underlying the new demand generation activities will be two key changes.
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Which Social Network is Right For B2B Marketing?
When you consider what social networks can become key marketing channels for your business, there isn’t one right answer. Take a quick look at the very different sharing patterns of the three sites below.
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Stop Advertising and Give Them Content! [The Numbers Prove It]
We all want to get more than we give, it is simply human nature. We don’t overpay at Walmart out of the goodness of our hearts. Likewise, we don’t pay attention to advertising that doesn’t give us something of value in return, either discounts, entertainment or information.
I could launch from here into the value of developing personas to ensure advertising is delivering value. And it is true, understanding your audience is critical. But instead, below are real results comparing an ad unit to other elements of the page.
Do You Need to Stop Measuring Marketing?
Measurement Love
I’m a bit of a nut for measurement. In fact, I spent the first eight years of my career focused on improving and applying digital marketing measurement.
I believe everything needs to be measured. But just maybe, we should stop measuring for a moment. Measurement has gone too far, expectations of measurement are too great, and measurement has clouded our judgement instead of informing it.
These days, all to often measurement has become the purpose, not a tool. One thing I learned in those first eight years [Read more…]
Social Media Success Starts with Commitment, Not Pilot
One of the biggest differences between social media and most other marketing channels is the idea of developing an audience. As a marketer, this may not seem all that new at first — you have a marketing database already, right? But an audience isn’t a database.
An audience chooses to listen to or engage with you. You earn your audience, by listening and engaging, by entertaining or by providing value. On Twitter, @comcastcares, @oatmeal and @thisissethsblog are good examples of each of these. More importantly, unless you are @charliesheen, developing an audience takes time. It takes hours (and hours), but it happens over weeks, months or more. And there is the rub for marketers.
Why B2B Marketing Is Not Social: An Unexpected Insight from SiriusDecisions
The most important thing I learned at this week’s SiriusDecisions Roundtable in Portland was not something Jonathon Block or Jay Gaines shared, and it wasn’t from a conversation with another attendee. It was the silence of Twitter.
Mind you, this was an event about social media and website optimization. Half of the content was focused on how to use social media throughout the sales cycle and the increase in demand this drives. [Read more…]
Making Your Social Media and Your Garden Deliver
You slave over getting it started. You carefully tend to it as it grows and matures. Then you realize it isn’t big enough to feed you. What you harvest is great, but is isn’t enough to make a difference in your budget.
Yes, your garden. That corner of your yard dedicated to growing edibles. It has a lot in common with your corporate social media program. It is nurtured as it grows, everyone loves seeing results, but it just isn’t enough to drive your business.
Twitter IS Social
This morning, eConsultancy posted Twitter isn’t very social: study, a review of recent research from Yahoo, taking the position that Twitter is not a social network. In fact, they question if Twitter is more of a broadcast medium than a social medium.
The statistic circulating through Twitter (by the way, being shared between connections on Twitter, but I won’t belabor the point) is that 50% of all content consumed on Twitter is generated by only 20,000 users. The elite, the top 0.05% of twitter users, create 50% of all content consumed on Twitter. Sound impressive? It’s not.
Social Media and Selfless Social Good
Do Companies Really Care?
I saw this weekend’s #usblogs challenge on social media and social good, and it clicked. Marketers want an emotional connection, they talk about “humanizing” brands and having conversations with people. Yet marketers often miss the opportunity to rise to an occasion and selflessly do good. Sure, companies respond with donations. However, many seem like calculated, self-serving moves, like the recent Bing gaffe to give to Japan.
The key marketers miss is selfless good. Look around, consider your friends. The real people, not the brands with a label next to your name. How many only care about themselves? How many only help others after weighing the benefit to themselves? Likely, not many (or you need some better friends). [Read more…]