Content Marketing Done Right – The Bitter Business

Content marketing when done right can deliver exceptional results yet as many as 75% of marketing departments are doing content marketing the wrong way. One big and critical difference between cont…

Source: Content Marketing Done Right – The Bitter Business

Today’s digital savvy buyers and educated consumers are ignoring traditional advertising and sales tactics like never before. They have become immune to brands telling them what to buy. Banner ads and online advertising are also feeling the heat with ad blocking technologies like AdBlock and AdDetctor helping consumers avoid advertising altogether. As one marketing agency stated “Internet savvy people are more likely to sign up for a trip to Mars than click on some banner ads.”

So, the logic would follow as buyers and consumers turn away from interruption ads online and are even using tools to nullify them, then marketing have responded to this challenge to ad weariness, right?

Ah no, this is unfortunately not always the case.

Marketing is contributing to “Content Blindness”

When developing content marketing strategies, over 75% of marketing leaders report that product mentions are a regular tactic in their content strategies. (The Economist Group). Marketing departments have responded to the move away from online advertising or “ad blindness”by viewers and implemented content marketing tactics to counteract this decline in raising product awareness. However by flooding the social media networks with promotional lead content, they are in fact now encouraging “content blindness”.

The sharing of content has become a breeding ground for brand plugging and promotional stuffing. The result is audiences are now starting to see some content shared by brands as being deceiving, missing out on the fact that when you strip away the advertising pitch many of these brands have powerful stories to share.

Content marketing is primarily about sharing great stories and as you earn the audiences trust you can begin selling your products. The hard sales pitch tends to turn off potential customers, so rather going straight into selling mode, start with building trust and credibility through informative content that adds value.

Prior to publishing an article or blog post, ask the following questions:

• Does the content offer real insights on a market or interest OTHER than plugging how great a product or service is?
• Do the articles and blogs showcase the company’s expertise by providing actionable tips or research based analysis?

If the answer is, “Yes,” to these questions, your content is ready to publish.

Hold on I hear you say, so if we work diligently to create content NOT to sell to our readers, then how do we use content marketing sell?”

Well research shows that less is more, the least sales pitch orientated articles drive more sales when executed correctly. This is because the content will drive awareness (inform, educate, amuse, engage) and ultimately help prospects become qualified leads as they consider you as a viable purchasing option.

Any business can create a content marketing journey for their prospects and over time gently guide them to the solution to solve their problems: considering your product or service. But the patience and skill is you have to let them arrive at that conclusion at their own pace.

Educate Through Content – Highlight Your Expertise

Real content marketing is about sharing thought leadership or research, addressing problems or market trends your customers or potential customers face. This stream of valuable content acts like a seed, planting the ideas which overtime grows into the realisation to prospects that they need your product or service.

The stark reality is that the press release route and publishing in-depth product descriptions serves only to create a wall between you and your audience. Audiences just tune out if they have not been primed with educational content before you go for the sale with “sales content”.

Also B2B buyers now use social media to research trends, reviews and ways to improve their business. This presents a great opportunity for marketers. But are B2B marketers missing the mark?

Well, the CMO Council studied how buyers viewed content published by business-to-business marketers. This quote may help focus your content strategy: “Business to business buyers and influencers are turned off by self-serving, irrelevant, over-hyped, and overly technical content.”

Still lots of B2B marketers think that “content marketing” almost like a Trojan horse, publishing product descriptions in the guise of content. But buyers constantly remind us they are not ready to be sold the moment they see some sales content. Their journey is about accessing content that understands their problems first.

So when publishing content on forums, LinkedIn or on the company blog, keep these best practices in mind:

1. Hold the sell. As most readers are looking to learn more about a topic, do not start bombarding them with promotional jabber. Content sharing focuses on engaging them through quality articles packed with valuable insights to encourage them to learn more. Remember, in the sales process it takes anywhere between three and thirteen interactions for a prospect to turn into a qualified lead, so starting a “social conversation” with a sales pitch baked in will chase away potential customers, so the goal is to get them to stick around to learn something.
2. Think of your audience, not your product. When creating and sharing content, always prioritise an audience first approach. What would the readers want to learn more about? What obstacles are they encountering and how can you overcome those? When you tap into your prospects’ needs and issues, you can create content that they can align themselves to and encourages them to continue the education process.
3. Become a valuable information resource. Publish helpful content on a consistent basis will give readers a reason to visit your blog time after time. Becoming a go-to resource is critical to building up followers and readers. I also suggest that carefully offering a white paper, e-book or case study to visitors is a way to gain more in-depth information.

As your journey into content marketing continues, remember that telling is not selling so put your audience’s interests before your own. Content will only grow in quantity on the web, and the way to avoid content blindness and do it right is never use sales pitches disguised as articles. Instead focus on sharing your expertise and insights. Always write to benefit the reader. As time progresses readers will take note of your genuine approach to offering solutions and then will be happy to engage with the sales process.

How to Use Social Media To Promote Your Business – The Bitter Business

The use of social media is now the most effective way when you need to promote or launch a business or new product. The free access to social networks for prospect identification and the ability to…

Source: How to Use Social Media To Promote Your Business – The Bitter Business

TIPS ON WRITING LINKEDIN MESSAGES — The Bitter Business

When implementing a digital sales or social selling program, the biggest single point of failure can be writing LinkedIn messages to buyers. Or to put it in simpler language, the ability to craft well thought out messages that convert into offline conversations between seller and buyer. Every sales strategy most likely has a multi activity […]

via TIPS ON WRITING LINKEDIN MESSAGES — The Bitter Business

B2B Marketing Strategies – The Bitter Business

In the world of B2B marketing strategies, CMO’s and marketing leads are finding out that there is allot more to them than just content and SEO.

Source: B2B Marketing Strategies – The Bitter Business

Social media marketing companies seem to trot out the well worn lines of, you must create a library full of content, recalibrate your SEO, share the content on the social networks, and HEY PRESTO. Your business will have a flow of low cost inbound leads from buyers interested in buying your product or service. The logic around a content lead strategy for lots of businesses stacks up as the lower cost of an inbound lead against an outbound lead is sizeable, making it attractive to invest in SEO, articles, blogging and content.

So it can be easy for any marketer to assume that we all use social media. Most marketing people are active on the social networks as it forms part of marketing tactics and we also have to be up-to-date on latest trends. However, this is not the case for lots of senior business people and buyers. I have worked with lots of CEO’s who do not have profiles on LinkedIn or Twitter. Others in senior positions are not actively engaged with social media to get a result on trying to build awareness for your brand or even social selling tactics.

What lots of social media agencies will never tell you is that an inbound strategy does not work for all market sectors and can be in fact a waste of money, resources and time. For certain B2B companies operating in certain markets or industries, the reality is the target buyer audience can be too small or the products or services too specialised to be worth over investing in SEO, Google Adwords or Content Marketing. If your business is a new or disruptive product then maybe buyers is not yet doing keyword searches on Google for the solutions you sell.

You see most inbound marketing tactics try to hit multiple keywords or topics to engage buyers. Most of these tactics really are inexpensive to tee up and implement but the audience engagement is not an exact science (you can’t stop anyone reading your articles). So it does take some time to refine your tactics to narrow down sell-to leads.

When articles or blog posts are ranked in search engine results, the relevancy to the topic is mainly down to the keywords it has been optimised for. If your target is HR directors in the banking industry in Ireland then content and even paid advertising cannot be specifically targeted at them 9you cannot control who reads or clicks). There are exceptions like social selling tools like LinkedIn or Connectors Marketplace where you can specify buyer profiles.

Let me be clear, I am not for one second suggesting B2B marketers should discount social media as part of their marketing strategy. The thing to remember is to keep the purpose and goals in perspective, don’t get carried away by stories, statistics and advice that may or may not be relevant to your business proposition.

To make social media pay, you should:
• Evaluate the social platforms for their fit to your marketing goals
• Can you feed them with quality content and informative articles
• Train up the sales team in social selling so they can use social media to nurture relationships

So when does inbound marketing have limited returns?

• The buyer is a specific person within that company: If one buyer has the authority to purchase your product with little influence from other stakeholders as it is not a critical purchasing decision (e.g. paper) then it is a challenge to engage this person with inbound marketing alone.
• The target market is small: When the target prospects are defined by location, company size or a single buyer (see above) in a company, the list of prospects can be very small. My own rule of thumb is if your prospect list is less than 1000 companies then a heavily weighted inbound strategy may only be helpful to raise awareness as the buyer will probably be targeted via sales calls.
• Disruptive technology or products: Where inbound excels is when the buyer is on a journey of self discovery (reading articles, whitepapers or engaged with social conversations) and where they understand the problem and the solutions. When a product is disruptive in nature a business may have to create demand as few buyers will be seeking out information. Inbound marketing does NOT create demand, it harvest levels of buyer interest based on keyword nets thrown out by marketing content.

The reality is that for some companies, the keyword net on Google searches and the social networks is simply too small to gather enough sales leads. This leaves options like outbound sales and referrals to harvest leads. We know referrals have a high conversion rate but this is not a repeatable sales process. So this leaves outbound selling (combined with social selling) makes for a repeatable, scalable sales process.

As someone who champions inbound marketing, social selling and good old fashioned sales techniques, I have to be frank and say if your products or services meet any of the criteria I wrote about above, then inbound marketing alone as a lead channel will have limited success. So contrary to what lots of social media gurus preach, inbound marketing is only part of the solution and it may not be a lead generation machine to feed sales.

So what marketing and sales strategies will work?

Marketing and sales leaders spend endless hours asking and answering this very question, “Where and how do we engage the right prospects?” The good news is there are still lots of options when it comes to reaching B2B prospects.

Embrace outbound prospecting: Hire in sales people who can pick up the phone and prospect AKA cold call. A business can now subscribe to automated lead generation platforms to give you large lists of prospects based on titles, industry and location with full contact details (email and telephone numbers) including social media profiles for social selling engagement. This works great for SaaS companies and companies with defined sales processes.

Still some life in events and trade shows: Attending events can be another way to connect with your target prospects and meet them in face-to-face. This can be a very personal approach that creates trust and builds relationships. The big barrier  is that events cost money, have higher cost per lead, take time to plan and are they cannot scale in any major way.

Industry Webinars: If your own marketing reach is too small to make hosting your own webinar an option, then maybe consider trying to find a market research company, an industry publication or forum or a contact where you can piggy bank on their webinars to get access to their audience. It does take effort but can be a great way to grow a prospect list while providing valuable content to generate more awareness.

Customer Referrals: Some businesses do manage to generate a large portion of their leads via customer referrals and word of mouth. But a note of caution, this tactic is difficult to forecast and scale. Also from a sales process, it is hard to have a programmatic approach to word of mouth referrals. Even formal referral programs usually have low level of leads in certain B2B sectors.

Exposure in publications: Online and print publications are a B2B marketing channel worth exploring. Product reviews, news and interviews can be a great way to reach an audience and connect with prospects

We must all accept that the buyer’s journey is changing. Yes, social media marketing agencies are right when they say business buyers are increasingly relying on social media, social conversations, social reviews and other content as a means of gathering information about vendor solutions. But regardless of what B2B marketing strategy you pursue to generate leads or sales, there is still a huge place for direct human contact via well trained sales people. In the sales process there will always be a place where questions will best be addressed in a personal way especially in higher value deal sizes.

Lead Generation Software from Connectors Marketplace

Source: Lead Generation Software from Connectors Marketplace | Lead Generation and Social Selling Articles and News

When it comes to using lead generation software in the quest for to speed up customer acquisition, we understand that every company has different needs. That is why, when it comes to sales prospecting, Connectors Marketplace offers you two options:

1) Self-Service Social Data
2) Automated Lead Generation Software

Our aim is to help your sales people to be as effective as possible which means maximizing the time they spend actually talking to potential customers. The buyer/customer journey has evolved rapidly in the past 3 to 5 years. Therefore, every business faces the difficult task of finding and interacting with prospects to make the sales funnel move faster with time poor buyers. Lead Generation tools and software provides the data plus contact points (email address, telephone details plus social profiles) to allow sales teams to focus their efforts on acquiring new customers. According to a recent survey, over 35% of business managers claimed that they lacked access to quality prospects. Almost 50% said they wanted the number of sale leads to increase. The lead Generation solutions from Connectors Marketplace solves these challenges by automatically generating fresh and relevant leads for your business.

Below are some benefits of using Lead Generation Software:

– Save’s you time identifing prospects
– Provides a continuous supply of verified leads
– Reduced cost-per-lead
– Targets quality prospects based on titles and profiles

So let me explain what each option from Connectors Marketplace provides:

Self-Service Social Data

This cost-efficient lead generation tool provides you with list after list of social media prospects for you to search through. It allows you to search by category and select keywords in order to find perfect prospects for your business. You can then add these leads to your own custom list. By providing you with each lead’s social media accounts, you can search to find more detailed information much faster than sourcing leads yourself. With Connectors Marketplace ‘Self-Service’ tool, prospect generation suddenly becomes a lot easier.

With a constant supply of leads, you have more time to focus on:

– Nurturing your leads
– Sharing and promoting content
– Building brand awareness
– Closing sale deals

Automated Lead Generation Service

This managed service does the hard work for you by providing you with your most relevant and influential leads with detailed contact and social information. We cater to your specific needs to make customer acquisition as simple as possible. You tell us the type of prospects you want to engage with, we’ll deliver the lists. With this service, quality leads are just a phone call away. No more tedious effort in trying to identify prospects or sourcing email addresses  because our technology and data collection experts produce a continuous supply of custom profiles and contact information based on social data. The goal of Connectors Marketplace is to save you time so that you can focus more of your energy on engaging with and nurturing relevant prospects.

In today’s world, it is essential for any marketing or sales strategy to produce a continuous flow of leads. Even for small businesses the need to constantly find new customers is a challenge. The sales and marketing community needs a strong tool with the ability to filter all social media jumble, posts, tweets, latest news, discussions and social media profiles to identify new business opportunities.

But what makes Connectors Marketplace ‘Automated Lead Generation Service’ different from any other lead generation service? There are already tools that exist in the marketplace that can give you reports about a company’s social media activity, however, Connectors Marketplace provides actionable insights with complete drill down ability to uncover, filter and segment sales opportunities across multiple social networks in one place. Unique data research is conducted for each company. This technology, combined with our own data scientists can generate highly targeted and detailed customer information in such a way that cannot be generated using our software alone. The detailed information we provide of each relevant prospect makes our social data more advanced which no other lead generation company can match.

So no matter which option is best for you, Connectors Marketplace will make the whole customer acquisition process a whole lot easier.

B2B Social Media Strategy

Source: B2B Social Media Strategy – The Bitter Business

How many small businesses really value a B2B social media strategy as a channel to create awareness and drive customer acquisition? As the social media networks and communities run into millions of business buyers on a journey of discovery the question has to be asked

Is your business maximising the potential of social marketing.

I am certainly not the only one who can prove that you can get leads and sales from social media plus measure the success; however some marketing and PR people still are not fully informed on what social media has been able to achieve in the past few years. If any proof was needed I have many examples of B2B focused businesses who have implemented a successful social strategy to engage buyers and drive higher consideration levels for their product or service. Yet many companies still have a very limited exposure or plan on to use social networks to help scale their sales. Is it due to a lack of resources, maybe   not sure of the value or return, maybe you think your business or product does not warrant investing in social, uncertain as to what social media can do or is it just a simple case of unsure as to how to implement a social media strategy?

If you are a business owner selling into a B2B market then maybe it is time to challenge some of your beliefs regarding the power of social. Nearly every business size and type can utilise social networking to boost buyer consideration. As a starting point let us discuss the various buzzwords and concepts we hear mentioned.

What does it mean to be a social business

The words “social media” can conjure up all types of ideas and meanings. While most people will identify or even use platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook, any strategy involving a social element is more than just profiles or getting followers. Being a social business means defining a whole range of actions and goals that match a bigger business. At the heart of it all social marketing is a belief, a concept, and an approach to engaging people for work, pleasure, family, friends or business. There were the ideals from which all platforms were created and I am sure on which new ones will be formed. However it is not limited just to the platforms mentioned above.

Social media allows us to open communication channels, local and global interactions and instantly share information or news across large networks of people.

If we take a wider or bird’s eye view of how social can impact our business then we switch from simply seeing B2B marketing as managing our Twitter account or Facebook page towards really evaluating how much a B2B social media strategy can help our business as a whole from sales to customer support to recruitment. The use of social networks can rapidly improve how we communicate both internally and to the external market which can open up all types of possibilities that go beyond the traditional view of what social media does for a business.

Let me give you a powerful example as to what social media can achieve.

The Ice Bucket Challenge. Just a few short summers ago, we all were throwing buckets of ice over ourselves or over someone else. It all started with someone living with Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) to raise awareness for people suffering from it. The idea quickly spread, so fast that the ALS Association made it an official charity effort. This fun activity, shared by so many of social media raised over $115 million for the charity. It resulted in over one million related videos on Facebook videos and got over two million mentions on Twitter.

Now I’m not suggesting business owner’s start throwing buckets of ice over their heads but I am using this example as a reason to encourage anyone involved in B2B sales or marketing to think broader about social. Even a small change in how we view things can bring a big change in what we prioritise.

There are many ways to extract value from the social networks

There are many ways in which the networks can help those in a B2B market to achieve their goals. A common issue I still find is that many B2B businesses still do not fully understand how social media can help them.

Most social media strategy plans are centred on using social to engage directly with a target audience. As a business network, LinkedIn is proving to be really effective for B2B sales and for social selling. As how sales teams prospect for new customers evolve then LinkedIn will increase in value for how sales people research and engage potential customers.

Now I hear you say, “OK apart from LinkedIn where else can I use social media in a B2B sales environment?” Well, it may surprise you but a business can use Twitter, Facebook, Owler, Crunchbase, Medium, Google+, Pinterest, WordPress and Blogger to drive buyer engagement. This list is not exhaustive. The value in B2B social media can be found in SEO, in readership, in views, in reviews, in referrals, in content found and shared, for data in social conversations, in buyer’s profiles, in social data and in potential buyer contact details.

There are tens if not hundreds of industry forums, interest groups and social business groups which can be tapped into to increase awareness for your business. Also think about what you can get out not just about what you have to put in (content, articles, information news). Does your strategy involve using the networks to source emails, telephone numbers, conference attendees, competitor analysis, event details, buyer likes and interactions?

Social Media Strategy is not an option

It is a must have. The world and buyers are changing how we source vendors. The average life expectancy of a company is now approx. fifteen years. Due to the impact the internet has on all our lives whether consumer or business means the world is moving fast and faster. As social media becomes more and more accessible on mobile, TV and devices while time poor buyers turn to it to self discover for purchasing decisions, then not engaging with it can leave you at a disadvantage.

Now is the time for B2B companies to really make social a key part of not only their digital strategy but their overall business strategy.

Social Media Drives Inbound Marketing Effectiveness

Source: Social Media Drives Inbound Marketing Effectiveness

“What marketing strategy should I use?” you may ask yourself. In a context where the question of whether Outbound marketing or Inbound marketing is more effective. Outbound marketing (which consisted of traditional advertising and push techniques) is slowly declining or not really considered in today’s fast paced marketing environment. Business and marketing leaders can’t lose time not taking advantage of what makes buyers and people tick now: Inbound Marketing!. It is the driver for successful lead nurturing and lead generation activity, helping buyers to find products and services as they are ready to buy.

In the new connected world, buyers are in the driving seat when deciding what they are going to buy. They select vendors or products based on what they are served up by the use of internet searches, referrals, reviews etc.

To adapt to this new world, marketing has turned to inbound strategies. Inbound marketing is composed of different elements (content, white papers, infographics, keywords, and analytics, E-mail, SEO and Social Media) which are managed towards the goal to drive audience to landing pages which are “gates to great content”.

To get higher levels of buyer consideration without paying big amounts of money via advertising, it is necessary to ensure that you are delivering the right content to the right audience. But what if you are paving the way and people still don’t see you?

The good news is that loves in the air: Content and Social Media are getting married. No one wants to be disturbed with generic product and service offers, but humans are expressing their curiosity and desires via social media and companies can tap into this with social selling.

Once you set up a content strategy, aligning creation of articles to audience profiles, you can reach potential buyers without the hard selling approach through social media. The tips below will guide you and enable you to use social media and social selling to profit with inbound marketing.

Map The Route

Define the buyer’s journey and then map it so you can fuel it with campaigns. To make that, it is essential to establish your goals, understand your customers` needs and aspirations, and think about ways to connect them.

Decision Making Timeline

It is crucial to have a detailed picture of buyers and to find out the influence and triggers in the customer decision journey. For instance, Marketing Tech products needs to be approved by different management levels, being processed through the circle in the image above.

What’s the hierarchy participation that influences decisions, who are the decision-makers?

To harness the power of social media and to understand who decides what in the buying process, you need to define personas and analyze the discussions of your targeted group.

In order to design a map, see what devices and channels are being used, what’s the main engagement channel (i.e. social media, website) and the sequence of actions taken before and after content consumption.

For instance, if the decision makers are distributed across lower hierarchy levels companies may consider creating more educative content for this audience, whereas if they are centered in a higher management level, it may imply more informative content creation for VP’s and CMOS. Besides that, there are the more obvious assumptions as B2C organizations might consider investing on Facebook and B2B institutions would go to LinkedIn.

Own and Earn Attention

Create value with content, narrowing down the funnel, awareness, consideration and sales (Pipeline metaphor). Also, closing the loyalty loop with nurturing (consumer decision journey).

Consumer Decision Journey (The vibe net)

First, it is important to take into account that there are four categories to reach with content marketing: Strangers, Visitors, Leads, Customers and Promoters. Content and blogging can ramp up the conversion among those from suspects to prospects by establishing authority, helping clients to educate and inform themselves and personalizing their experience.

But to be found in social media and organic searches it’s vital to produce great content and distribute it through all the social channels.

Being educational and helpful provides value when it answers questions or concerns that potential buyers are searching for. Blog posts would fit in the space that leads are looking for specific information whether it as an idea or an offer.

To avoid content creation targeted at too many meaningless keywords, blend the existing SEO plan with Brand identity talk, because speaking up your “value wedge” makes the language consistent and generates higher awareness.

Create content that talks to the customer and generates engagement. Define which content resonates best with your network and route your messages with the right professionals and the right tools to talk with your audience through persona visualizations and specific topics.

For inbound marketing to be successful, keep your content in context with customer interests to generate sales. Everyone should strive to have a rich understanding of consumer behavior and familiarity with company’s products and social communities.

Although the use of big data to drive marketing is still somewhat unclear, with some data expertise organizations could automate some marketing processes and to use the right tools to accelerate results.

There is a vast amount of content out on the web, but it is essential to believe in the power of Free to get attract visitors with courses, infographics, whitepapers and educational or informational content.

Basically, inbound marketing works by attracting suspects based on keyword optimized content, pre-qualify and drive conversions based on the authority of the content. A good tactic is to attract people by curiosity content and take advantage of this interest to promote your product in a seamlessly way.

B2B Social Attitude

Give your Inbound approach a life with Social Media, promoting your brand and improving business growth. Add scale, deepen relationships and test ideas, products and services.

How to adopt Inbound into Social practices? It is more than follows, shares and likes that creates social media success, but do use these tools as a way to build interactions and maintain relationships. With tools to slice and dice data, it is possible to take shortcuts and let communication go a step further to move beyond demographics and focus on gaining a holistic view to target individuals.

The way a message is addressed in each social platform must be customized as you understand the differences in each of them.

To get better outcomes, here are a few hints.

1. Get Visual

People digest images and infographics better than text, so what about give a special touch on your profile, cover photos and most especially, in campaigns.

You can use images in creative ways, bringing experience to visual. For instance, a company that is in the engineering industry for a long time can add an old photo that resonates with their public and combine it with content.

You can use short videos, infographics and free sourced images to enrich content, always remembering to use good headlines and descriptions.

2. Ask Questions

Ask conversational-starter questions, if you are a B2C you can ask what mobile brand they advocate or as a B2B what was their best experience with customer service solutions. People like to share their thoughts. Using social media, you can start and participate in conversations.

It is important to find ways to solve problems for prospects and really empathize with them.

To make the process more natural it’s a good strategy to use employee advocacy, starting with the ones who are already on social media, who can share content, humanize the companies` brand and get conversations going in a seamlessly way.

3. Calls to Action

While you showcase your expertise and offer value in the form of great content, remember to add calls to action. Whether it is a trial, discount or educative whitepapers, highlight what you are offering from a basic “Learn More” to the personalized, or bolder, “Be awesome at” (B2B users are consumers in their personal lives and can get easily bored).

These Calls to Action should drive to gated landing pages which allow you to differentiate visitors from different backgrounds and convert leads into prospects. On this page, ask basic information in a well-designed frame.

Even if Outbound is still useful to create awareness and engagement campaigns for smaller groups, Inbound marketing is more effective as it enables organizations to target individuals and broader groups at the same time. Every social media marketing strategy needs to keep advancing faster, in parallel with changing consumer behavior, and needs to be constantly fine-tuned with people’s needs and aspirations. It is vital to plan and see ahead, optimizing all marketing efforts with real time actions. Social media plays an important role not just in sales or marketing but in every aspect of business.

Brian OConnell

lead the sales and marketing drive for Connectors Marketplace

More Posts – Website – Twitter – LinkedIn

Posted in Social Data, Social Media, Social ProspectingTagged content marketing, inbound marketing, lead generation, lead nurturing, marketing, social media, Social Media Marketing, Social Selling

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Social Media Facts and Trends – The Bitter Business

Social media facts and trends for marketing supported by user statistics are now influencing marketing strategies and tactics.

Source: Social Media Facts and Trends – The Bitter Business

Companies have already started to bypass the more traditional mass media products of radio campaigns, TV ads and press promotions in favour of driving awareness on the social networks.

Listed below are some social media facts, trends and social media statistics to help inform how or where a business might focus their social media strategy.

Remember that today, social media is allot more than just likes, followers or branding. It is a complete publishing and sales channel with the ability to tap into large volumes of data together with a reach that stretches into the millions of buyers.

Build a social network channel now

This is not a trend, this is a must do. Any business who is resourcing and building their social media channels (populating them with audiences) are creating an online publishing platform with built in marketing channels and a content marketing distribution network that works 24/7. Company leadership should view these social media networks as valuable digital assets that will grow each year. Done correctly, social media networks will give any business huge leverage in winning over customers and a connected marketing channel which works nonstop.

So without further ado, let us take a look at statistics for the major social media networks.

Statistics on Social Media Demographics

The social media networks are a whole universe of conversations, tweets, like, followers, profiles, content, data and interests. Social data tells us they are no longer just used by the young and the nerds. Social media interaction is a truly global activity, embraced daily by people of all ages and in every corner of the web.

Social media trends and statistics

# 72% of all internet users are now active on social media

# 89% of 18-29 year age group use social media

# 30-49 age groups has now over 72% usage

# Over 60 percent of 50 to 60 year olds are active on social media

# Even in the 65 plus age bracket, 43% are using social media

# 84% of C-level/vice president executives use social media to support purchase decisions

# Nearly one in three consumers are influenced by social media in their purchases

# 87% of consumers are influenced by reviews read on social media

# 71% of users access social media from a mobile device

# Twitter has over half a billion users

# Facebook has over 1 billion users

# LinkedIn has nearly a quarter of a billion users

# Google+ has more than 2.5 billion users but only 10% are active

The myth that social media is the playground of the young has been debunked. Buyers, consumers, shoppers, sellers, seekers, businesses and organisations are all to be found in the social media universe. The age barrier is no longer relevant except for demographic targeting

“Facebook is still the biggest social media network. But Google+ and Twitter are serious contenders for audiences”.

Marketing and Business Love Social Media

93% of marketing departments use social media for branding/business

70% of brands have a presence on Google+

Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are the top 3 sites used by marketing

Here are some other social media statistics and infographics to mull over.

Every business that wants to engage deeper with target audiences should be increasingly aware of the global march towards a near total digital age, one which rewrites the rules on how brands engage with buyers.

These social media statistics with researched data makes it even more evident that the only way forward to engaging consumers and buyers is through social media communications.
Understanding the global social media landscape is not just some useful information; it provides valuable insights and data that must be central to any business strategy.

Social Media Trends – Forecast

#Social media is “in-the-moment” updates will grow rapidly. Real time sharing of video and content is going to get faster and better

#Buy Buttons. Major social media brands will feature some kind of buy button as an element of their online advertising campaigns

#In-app features will spread giving marketers ever more opportunities to engage with their audiences

#New content marketing or publication channels will evolve on existing social networks

#User privacy and the use of social data concerns will grow

#Internet Users now totals 3.175 Billion, that’s nearly half of the world’s population (7.357 Billion).

#Mobile is the future. Nearly 2 Billion users utilise their mobiles for Social Media

#Social media searches within social platforms will become more powerful

#Video will grow. Videos average 62% more engagement than photos. Live video streaming is set to explode

#Smart advertising is on the up. Big data will allow brands to target specific buyer intent or triggers

#Content specific to each social media channel and audience will evolve

#The rise of influencer marketing spend within user generated content will become more visible.

So there you have some social media trends and statistics. How relevant they will be in 6 or 12 months (or by the time you have read this article) is anyone’s guess. The important thing is to keep on top on what is happening on the social networks and don’t chase every social media fad that comes along.

Effective Content Marketing Strategy

Source: An Effective Content Marketing Strategy | Instant Lead Generation For Social Selling

Does your content marketing strategy find it challenging to create and publish content that engages with your target customers?

As digital becomes the dominant marketing channel, in order to increase brand exposure and have effective lead generation online then a strong content marketing strategy is required. Most social media plans are dependent on one factor, the creation and delivery of relevant, engaging content that will be of interest to your target audience.

Content marketing is a continuous process, and it is vital for professionals to monitor their efforts and adapt their strategy to the ever changing preferences and insights of their market.

Below are some greatly beneficial tips, explaining how to best implement your content marketing strategy

Gain Audience Insights
Knowledge is key, you need to research and discover where your target audience hang out online. Ask yourself; what conversations and topics do they contribute to? What type of content do they respond to? What topics grab their attention?
This can be done through competitor and market analysis; study your competitor posts, which topics have the most user responses? Analyze your own posts for insights into what style or content your target audience engage with most. Consider analyzing your audience through surveys and Google Analytic. This will enable you to target them directly, as you know their online behaviors and what platforms they use to share and interact with online.

Set Clear Goals and Objectives
Prior to the group brainstorming session, you must visualize the goals you want to achieve. Set out clear objectives to focus on, this will help the team work towards something collectively as they are all on the same page. For example; ‘Brand A seeks to provide delicious foods suitable for people with coeliac disease, to give them more choice and a varied diet. Isolating the factors in this statement can be done easily, for example – Your target audience would be people with coeliac disease, your content would be from recipes, and the coeliac society. Your main objective would be to provide people suffering from coeliac disease with more food options.

It is also important to plan and outline the type of content you will be creating:

• 40% recipes, advice, and interesting content to encourage user engagement
• 20% content curation from other sources
• 20% brand promotion (press release/mentions)
• 10% product focused ideas
• 10% promoting company culture, and recruiting of new talent

Content Research
The creation of relevant and engaging content necessitates research. Google Alerts can save you time, in that Google will notify you by email when it discovers fresh results on topics that you have flagged would be of interest to you. This tool detects current, real-time updates on web pages, blogs and articles. It can be used to keep track of trends, interesting topics and insights within your industry.

Google Alerts can also be used to tell you when your brand has been mentioned online, so you could respond to a customer review/query/complaint efficiently. This is an excellent avenue to remain current/up to date on the latest news stories, videos and topics. Enabling you to take inspiration from these findings to create relevant and current blog posts which you know will be of interest to your audience, as this is done in real-time.

Think Evergreen Content
The Evergreen process is slow and steady; results will be seen over time, rather than a surge in traffic due to a ‘trending’ topic. Evergreen content will not become obsolete any time soon; take ‘spin selling’ – this was a very popular topic ten to fifteen years ago, it was highly searched. Now very few people are talking about it, as this model has since been overtaken.

Entrepreneur Syed Balkhi states that Evergreen content is useful for long-term sustainability and is SEO friendly. It will theoretically drive traffic for years and will continue to be a popular search.
‘I like to write 20-30 evergreen titles that will rank well over time. They should reflect the style and tone of your target audience: If you’re catering to a market of entrepreneurs and creative professionals, they should be more informative, with an approachable yet cordial tone’.
Team members will know that the focus of their content should not be self-promoting; instead it should be informative and educational for their audience – focusing on solving their problems.

Choose Your Medium
Gather team members together for a brainstorming session, everyone will have different ideas and opinions, but the mission statement that you created earlier will keep everyone on track and focused on the same goal. Through team brainstorming exercises, you can define which medium should be used to communicate what content.

Blog posts are hugely beneficial for getting your point across, but explaining how to use computer software for example would be best suited to a demo video. Stats would be more engaging on an infographic rather than a long list of bullet points. This could also help in targeting more readers, through different platforms – you could use an infographic on Instagram with a link to the full article in the bio.

Content Consistency Is Key
Once you have defined your content strategy, create an editorial calendar. This will help you schedule posts, and articles. Your resources, such as your team and budget will determine the frequency of your content. Although it is inherent to be consistent with your content – posting three quality and relevant blog posts a week will get the attention of your audience. Your target is now accustomed to seeing your helpful and insightful content, and they know of the brand you represent. What happens if you become side-tracked by another task and post only one blog the next week? You will appear flaky and dis-interested to your target.

Having your calendar to reference will remind you that perhaps a blog post is due in two days. If you do not have time in your schedule, give your team the assignment of creating and sharing the blog. There needs to be a concrete plan of action set out, so blog posts and interactions are relevant, executed in real-time and followed up on accordingly.

Publish, Promote and Track Your Posts
While quality of content is paramount, there are still many other factors to consider. Keep in mind that posts should be relevant, engaging and informative. They should have an appropriate tone suited to the reader, in a B2C setting for example – be careful not to speak corporate and overload the customer with jargon. You must also be cautious of the grammar police, double check, even triple check your spelling and always ask a colleague to proof-read your post.

Enhancing your content for SEO purposes could improve your brand’s page ranking on Google. Study the analytics from your posts, this will guide you when creating new content, perhaps a certain topic or phrase is more popular than others. You can then create similar content or a modernized version, of how Social Selling has evolved in the past year.

Your bounce rate should also be considered, you must ask yourself why users read a post and do not navigate elsewhere on your site. What can you do to keep them on your site and looking around? Perhaps there is an increase in referral traffic from another site, why not interact and link with this website for a mutual benefit?

Be conscious of misleading headlines, you may get an influx of traffic to your site with a misleading headline, but once the user realizes the article is not relevant to the title, they will click back straight away. You should bear in mind that Google will penalize you based on your ‘click back’ rate.

Conclusion
While content marketing can be intimidating and does require resourcing, the sooner companies adopt this process the sooner results will flow. It is not only hugely beneficial in enhancing brand image, engaging with potential customers and increasing inbound traffic to your site but content marketing is now a core business activity.
Buyers and consumers want to engage with companies who demonstrate industry knowledge and insights. Evergreen content marketing also contributes heavily to building back links to your site, so it is imperative to have a joined up content marketing strategy in place to bring the pieces together.

Social Media Marketing Plan

Source: Social Media Marketing Plan – The Bitter Business

A social media marketing plan should not pose any major challenges to a small business. As in any growing business with a great product or service, the marketing team or person is most likely to be working on different tasks at different times and these tasks can change rapidly depending on the business needs. However, even with taking this into consideration, social media is now so vital to business success there are some tasks that need to be planned as part of the daily marketing routine.

Set the social media goals and objectives.

Every article, news release, research or whitepaper are assets in a social media strategy to serve the goals that have been set. As with any business strategy you must know what you are working toward. Is it drive brand awareness, customer acquisition, generate new sales drive traffic, build up your network, reduce the cost per lead. Whatever of any or all of these you need goals and associated objectives clearly defined.

Work on the content strategy

When it comes to marketing the product or service, social media marketing success depends on the content strategy a business decides upon. Prior to writing, commissioning or publishing any content, a business needs to understand, what audience(s) are going to be  targeted?, What type of voice (expert, commentator, industry) will you use to communicate? Who are you trying to influence? What specifically do you want to achieve (leads, likes, traffic, views or authority)?  Allot of strategy answers are to be found in questioning the content strategy so everyone involved in the marketing and sales efforts need to know the why, what and who, understand it and is always in their minds. Content marketing strategy can then be tweaked and optimised as necessary.

Make sure there is new quality content to post

Fresh, quality, informative and relevant content is at the core of every social media campaign to reach target audiences and ensure engagement. To be seen as an influencer and sector expert it is vital to share new content consistently and regularly. New content when well written (not self- promotional or product articles) and engaging can propel a business forward. This is why the person in charge of the social media plan needs to make sure there is always some new content ready to be shared. There is no hiding the fact that writing content does take time and continuous effort so it needs to be planned.

Set up a content sharing schedule

The social media plan needs to have a schedule when content will be shared so all social marketing activities tie back into other marketing events or business plans. Also a schedule will take account for any external events, key word targeting, launches, promotions or seasonal trends that impacts your industry. This is why the content sharing calendar is so important for deciding what social media activities are in the pipeline. While not all content can be created and planned for weeks in advance of sharing, the core, and keyword targeted content pieces that demand more care and effort should be.

Sharing sector Expertise

Selling is not sharing. Share your sector expertise on a regular basis in terms of marketing, insights, research, social stories and commentary to establish your business, product or service as an influencer. For every 1 self-promotional content pieces shared, share 4 quality “industry relevant” articles, also share insightful articles from other authors, comment and add value (not plugging your own business) on forums and groups.

Generate new content ideas

As stated above the value a great, insightful and quality piece of content can bring to a social media campaign cannot be overstated. This is why a business needs to spend the time brainstorming content and article ideas. Every business should always allocate time for it on a weekly basis. The reality is that without interesting ideas on content your goals and results will suffer in the long run. Content needs to be kept fresh, up-to-date and interesting in order to continue engaging an audience. An easy way of generating content ideas is to track your competitors and other influential blogs to see what content is working for them.

Following news for current and relevant content

As with most companies, some of your content marketing will be focused on industry news and events. This is why keeping informed of relevant news and events means you will be able to react quickly and creatively to opportunities which can boost your on-line exposure. Many social media managers monitor several different keywords, hashtags, social group and Twitter in order to keep up the date and in the know on trending topics. When the opportunity presents itself, it is vital to be ready to respond.

Include images, video and design

Social media is also a visual channel where images, video and good design can give an added edge in the awareness stakes. Using nice imagery or videos and a visually stimulating way of presenting content is far more likely to reach and engage a large audience. As the volume of content rises across social channel, great content should be complimented with visual impact. A business should working with a designer in order to produce visual elements like photos, infographics and video.

Run social advertising

To add to organic reach on social networks, depending on your social media goals and business then social advertising on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn may be a consideration. Running a paid social campaign might help get the content out to a wider audience and more relevant readers.

Communicate with all stakeholders

Whether you are a social media manager working in an agency or working directly for a company, you will need to work with all the stakeholders (management, sales, product, marketing and service) in order to agree on the content to be shared. This is why social media marketers should be spending time with the all the stakeholders to plan for the future as part of the marketing daily tasks. Meeting all concerned can help gain more insights into deciding what type content to create, what upcoming events are there in the pipeline, launches or news that may be of interest and any other ideas to use content to engage the target audiences.

Reporting

Finally but as important is the reporting on social media actions, activities and results. Whether you work for a company or an agency, it is vital to report on the social networks achievements and the upcoming plans in place. This is done by setting up and agreeing on regular reports that monitor the KPI’s or metrics you have agreed on with the stakeholders.

For more social media marketing tips, read the marketing category on The Bitter Business.