So Scary It Will F#*K You Up For Life

  

  

 delicious  

  

I ran across this video on a blog I follow. It is a story told by one of the keynote speakers from the recent Content Marketing World conference, and it reminds me of that old Dudley Moore movie Crazy People.  In that movie Dudley Moore is an ad executive that has a breakdown and gets committed.  He and the other patients quickly become the hottest ad agency in the country by putting together campaigns with taglines like:  This Movie is So Scary It Will F$*K You Up for Life.  Cut to hordes of people storming the theaters.

In this real world, social media enabled example, Disney (of all companies) is the group on the cutting edge.  Forward to the part of the video with the woman speaking as she's the one that tells the story.  You brand marketers out there are going to love this!

B2B Social Media Strategy - Defining Keywords You Want to Own

  

  

 delicious  

  

Search engine results are a key metric for any Social Media or content marketing effort.  You need to be on the top page of Google results for as many keyword combinations as possible related to your area of expertise....but what keywords should you be targeting and why?

Identifying Important Kewords For Your Business

After industry and content assessment and editorial planning, the first thing we do when helping clients take a look at the keyword marketplace is find out what Google is charging for keywords based on their areas of expertise.  Google Adwords has a nifty keyword analysis tool that provides insight into how many searches are done for particular keywords and how much they are charging per click to buy a listing for that keyword.

Since we are not interested in buying keywords, but instead developing content that is going to get us top of page organic results for a long time to come, what we're really interested in is how many times certain keyword combinations get hit every month.  This starts to give us a potential universe of people we can attract to our site.

Another great tool to use for assessment of keywords is Hubspot's Keyword Grader.  This provides insight into how difficult it will be to achieve first page Google results for a particular keyword combination.  This is where things start to come into focus.

Focus on Longtail Keywords

A mini case study.  We have a client that sells wireless life safety monitoring equipment - primarily electronic monitoring of fire extinguishers.  Looking at the keyword "Fire Extinguisher" there are tens of thousands of monthly hits.  "Fire Extinguisher" as a keyword, however, had an extremely high difficulty score in Hubspot and an expensive pay-per-click fee.

Instead, we helped our client focus on what they were really selling, the value they were providing and the questions prospects were asking them that led to sales.  We identified dozens keywords that were more easily attainable.  For example Fire Extinguisher Vandalism, Fire Extinguisher Violations, Fire Extinguisher Monitoring, etc.  We developed a content strategy around these keyword combinations ad quickly took these critical keywords (and dozens of others) over.  Focused longtail results are often much more valuable to a business and more successful in generating leads than the generic, high-traffic terms.

So when it comes to defining the keywords to own, start by:

• Understanding the keyword universe for your business
• Identify keywords that define the value you provide to prospects
• Start with accessible, longtail terms
• Build towards generic terms over time

For 

Tips for Defining a Social Media Strategy for a B2B Company

  

  

 delicious  

  

When discussing social media with B2B companies (after they tell us their industry is different and social media marketing won't work there), people often ask us, "How do you even get started?".  Our answer is always the same.  Begin with the end in mind.  Have a clear understanding of what you want to accomplish so that you have a plan and a vision you can execute against.

Regardless of industry, to turn social media into a valuable corporate asset, you will need to produce content, and the first question you should ask yourself is, who are we generating it for.

Social Media Audience Definition

• Describe your ideal prospect and your existing customers.  Are they different?

• What is their job description, education level, age?

• Where do they get their content today

• What questions are they trying to answer

• What are their concerns, their goals, their challenges, how are they changing?

• How many of them are there?

• Define your secondary audience - media, secondary prospects, industry at large, bloggers

After you have defined your audience, you can start to describe what and how you want to engage with them.

Social Media Editorial Mission

• Define the value you will provide to your audience

• What are the topics you will cover on a consistent basis

• Define the social media vehicles you will utilize and prioritize them.  

  • Blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Others

• Define how many times you will publish on each 

• Here is a good example of an editorial mission modified as a "welcome to our blog" blog post - http://blogs.carouselindustries.com/general/welcome-to-the-carousel-industries-blog/

• Your internal editorial mission should also include company goals, for example:

  • Generate more traffic to your website
  • Improve engagment with customers, prospects and potential prospects
  • Generate more leads via on-line channels
  • Enhance our perception as a thought leader in the industry
  • Nuture sales prospects through the sales pipeline

Accomplishing these first two steps will make you feel as if you are on much firmer ground.  At this point, you can start making progress without feeling as if you are making a mistake.

The next things to define include your Target Keyword Universe (might as well think about SEO from the very beginning), your Editorial Voice (how are you going to come across) and start setting up an "Industry Listening Outpost" so that you have a steady stream of information and news to work with.  But each of those is future post.  Stay tuned!

On-Line Ad Spending Up in 2011 and Every Year Thereafter

  

  

 delicious  

  

The shift in advertising dollars to the web has been rapid and inexorable, and the trend shows no sign of slowing.

According to research firm eMarketer:

3 Keys to B2B Company Success WIth Twitter

  

  

 delicious  

  

For the past several years, client after client has told FuelDog that their business is different, that in their industry, nobody is using Twitter, and anyway "I don't have time for that".  Here's what those clients need to know...first, you're wrong, second, you're thinking about Twitter incorrectly, and third, you do have time because it literally takes one minute to create a valuable tweet.  You may not have time to blog, but you do have time to Tweet.

With this said, we are not suggesting that you invest time and energy in Twitter for your health.  You are doing this to create business value.  In the case of Twitter, this means attention and leads. Here are the 3 keys to B2B success with Twitter.

Provide Valuable, On-Topic B2B Content to a Focused Audience

Twitter is not all about you and your company.  Don't think of it as a way to talk about your organization non-stop.  Think of it as a way to present your expertise, your understanding of the industry you serve, your perspective and your thought leadership to an audience comprised of potential customers.  Steps to make this happen:

• Define your target audience - who are they, what types of problems do they face
• Define your editorial focus - how can you provide value to your audience, not just sales pitches. Start with the thought that you want to solve their problems and answer their questions...even if they don't know they have them yet
• Follow your industry daily - set up Google Alerts, RSS feeds from industry publications, follow leading bloggers.  This will give you all the ammunition you need to come up with a nugget or two of insight a day for your audience. 
• Tweet at least once a day.  Only one out of every 5 tweets should be about your company, or your followers will stop paying attention to you....actually, they will probably never follow you to begin with.

By executing on the above for a few weeks, you can then:

Build a Large Following of the Right People

The way that you build a following in Twitter is by following other people.  On Twitter, when you follow someone, about 30% of the time they will follow you back.  In order to build the correct type of audience, find the experts that are already tweeting about your "topic" and start following their followers. 

For example, if you are interested in an audience of CIO's, you may want to find CIO Magazine (@CIOMagazine - they currently have 4,231 followers) and follow their followers.  Ditto for well known bloggers in the space.  Ditto for your competitors.

There are a number of different software products in the market that will help  you build your audience automatically (it is a real pain to click on 500 names a day manually).  Be sure to unfollow people that haven't followed you back within 3 days.  The reason for this is that Twitter has break points.  For example, you can't follow more than 2,000 people until you have 2,000 followers yourself. 

This may seem a little bit mercenary, but the goal is to build an audience of the right people quickly.  You will do that by providing valuable content and following the right people.

Once you've executed on the first two steps, you are positioned to "Move the Needle"

Drive Attention and Leads to Your Company

Now that you have a focused audience paying attention to you on Twitter, start to make Twitter an important part of your marketing mix.

• If you have a company blog, Tweet every time there is a new post (try several times in slightly different ways).  You will drive incremental traffic.
• If you have a case study, white paper, webinar that you are promoting - and trying to get people to register for - Tweet about it (several times in slightly different ways).  This will drive additional leads into your sales pipeline.  If one sale comes out of this, you've likely paid for your investment.
• Speaking at a conference?  Exhibiting at an event?  Interviewed for a magazine?  Get it up there.
• Press releases?  Get them on Twitter....as long as you are adding value to your followers in different ways, promote yourself.  Just don't solely promote yourself.
• Use http://bit.ly as your URL shortener...they have the best analytics so you can see how your Tweets are pulling.

Twitter is not all about kids blabbing on and on about what they had for dinner or where they are meeting their friends.  Business people are using this as an important channel for gathering information and as an easy way to promote their expertise.  Follow the 3 easy steps.

1.  Provide Valuable, Focused Content
2.  Build a Large Following of the Right People
3.  Use Twitter to "Move the Needle" and Generate Attention and Leads

Will Social TV Change the Media Landscape?

  

  

 delicious  

  

For those of you have been with FuelDog for the last 13 years, you know that he's always looking at and thinking about the breaking edge of technology and media.  An area that has been taking up a lot of his brain time lately is Social TV.  The time has come for the intersection of TV and the Internet finally make its way into our living rooms in a big way.

In a very thought provoking blog post from The SocialITe, he makes a compelling case for how social networks are changing the TV viewing experience already.

Twitter has added an additional dimension to TV shows for some time. The BBC political debate 'Question Time' has a furiously active Twitter debate always running live whenever it's broadcast and the big competition shows such as X-Factor and Strictly Come Dancing all encourage a lot of online debate and argument.

What is a "Re-Visit" and Why Should My Sales Team Care?

  

  

 delicious  

  

A re-visit may not be a term you are familiar with, but it is one of the most important sales tools your company has and you should be tracking them and acting upon them.

A re-visit is that magical time when a lead or a prospect returns to your site to review additional information, dig into rich content, or respond to a blog article you have written.   This is a lead, a prospect or a customer that you already know, but they are now re-engaging to learn more.  With the right process and tool set (like HubSpot) in place, your sales people can be made immediately aware when one of their leads is back on your site or your blog and what they are viewing.

This is a terrific time to contact your prospect or your customer to strike up a helpful conversation.  It enables your team to be seen as a trusted expert as opposed to someone doing the hard sell.  With the potentially long sales-cycles associated with b2b sales, providing value and expertise at the right time will allow you to gather information and move the sales process along without doing the full court press.

Of course, if your site has no new content that your prospects will find valuable, it is very difficult to attract those 're-visits'.   So give them a reason to come back and make sure you know when they do!

The Essence of Social Media Marketing

  

  

 delicious  

  

Sometimes, FuelDog likes to go back and re-read things he wrote about in the past, and a blog post that he wrote back in June of 2007 has been sticking in his mind.  Here it is:

Quote of the day.  Came across this article while perusing MediaPost's Online Spin blog.  It is about Facebook and how they are opening up their platform to any developer that thinks they have an idea to improve it and bring value to the community.  It is important enough that FuelDog posted it on the conference room whiteboard.  The post is summarized by this point, which is very insightful and should be a rule of thumb for all of us thinking about attempting to create or market into these networks.

"Providing value to social media communities will be the new cost to distribute marketing messages in the social media OS (environment)."

Simple, but vital.  What value are you adding?  Remember, you are not longer the judge of that, the community is and if they don't see the value in what you are providing, your messages will fall on deaf ears.

That quote, which was on the conference room white board for several years, is still very meaningful.  However, the world has evolved, every business person has changed the way they do business since this quote was originally drafted, and FuelDog has refinements to that insight...they are subtle, but vital.

"Providing content that your target customer finds valuable is the price you must pay in order to generate leads for your sales pipeline."

If you deliver enough value to someone interested in your expertise that they raise their hand and tell you who they are, that person is now a lead and you need to work to turn them into a customer.

Inbound Links Top SEO Priority for Digital Marketers

  

  

 delicious  

  

Marketers engaged in digital marketing cited a focus on link building as their key priority over the next 12 months, according to a survey conducted by SeeWhy Inc. 

Obviously, if you are interested in getting to the top of the organic search rankings for your vital keywords, inbound links are going to give you your biggest bang for the buck.  It is estimated that 75% of a good Google rating is based on the number of inbound links.  The quetion is, how do you get effective inbound links?  The answer is not as simple as you may think.

FIrst, you have to have good Content, that people are interested in linking to.  If you are not saying something worth hearing, you are trying to get people to listen to the sound of one hand clapping.  An on-going, focused effort to create targeted and valuable editorial content is critical.  On-going is a key term in this equation as if you generate content for a few weeks and then stop, Google and Bing will stop paying attention.

Second, you have to be listening.  Who else is talking about your areas of focus.  You need to know when these conversations start and join them.  This will encourage people to link to you and write about your valuable content.  This will also give you the ability to point to your related content in a meaningful way within the comment section of these blogs or sites.  FuelDog has had tremendous success with this approach with http://www.GreenCollarResearch.com where we have generated almost 20,000 inbound links and counting.

Third, you have to ensure that people can find YOU.  You need to focus your content on keywords that people are listening for and that are related to your overall corporate mission.  You must make sure your site is on-site optimized so that you register as an expert in your area of specialization.

We all want as many links as possible pointing to us.  Putting together the right inbound marketing strategy to make sure that heppens is the key to success.

B2B Marketers Jumping on Custom Content In A Big Way

  

  

 delicious  

  

For years FuelDog has been urging our customers to act like media companies (at least those of our clients that aren't media companies).  It seems like all of our hard work is finally paying off. 

According to a recent study put out by MarketingProfs and Junta42, about 90% of B2B  marketers commit time, resources and budget to custom content creation or custom content marketing.  This activity represents about 26% of their total marketing budgets...WOW, what a difference from a couple of years ago.  What are we talking about?  Social media, articles, in person events, e-newsletters.  Certainly a step in the right direction, but createing content that leads to increased search visibility and sales leads is the real objective. 

Interestingly, only half of the marketers plan to increase spending on content marketing in the next year.  That makes FuelDog wonder if that is because they are overwhelmed by qualified leads or if they just don't quite get it yet.   because it works, when so many other marketing channels are losing effectiveness.