8 Common Mistakes in B2B Social Media Marketing

Here are eight common mistakes B2B companies make when jumping into social media marketing. Avoid these, and you'll greatly increase your chances of success.

1. Using social media as a direct response vehicle.

Unless your product is a price-sensitive impulse purchase (e.g. a restaurant tweeting about today's lunch specials), social media doesn't work well for direct response. For B2B companies, social media is primarily about interaction and knowledge sharing. A hard-sell approach is not only ineffective, but it can also damage a firm's brand.

2. Expecting instant results.

Social media is not like an advertising or email blast campaign designed to produce immediate results; it takes time to develop relationships, build significant blog readership or attract a large Twitter following. Social media marketing can produce significant results, but not overnight.

3. Failing to invest sufficient time and effort.

As a consequence of #2 above, many social media efforts are dubbed failures before they have a chance to succeed. Blogs have a few posts written and are then abandoned. Twitter accounts sit silent with only a handful of followers. Facebook fan pages go without updates for months on end. The B2B companies achieving results with social media are those that set a clear strategy, adjust tactics based on results and experience, and maintain commitment to their social media efforts.

4. Focusing internally.

Social media is about listening and interacting. Focusing only on your own message -- our product this, our company that -- is as boorish as talking only about yourself at a business mixer or cocktail party. Of course, you can link to your own blog posts or other content on occasion, but these should be mixed in with links to external content, and in the context of answering a question or providing helpful information to solve a problem.

5. Not building networks or using syndication.

It's not enough to have great content. You need other people sharing it on your behalf as well. Use your blog, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts, and other social media tools to build a network of influencers who will amplify your content, and use RSS syndication sites to expand the reach of your blog.

6. Having unoptimized and inconsistent profiles.

For CEOs and anyone who represents the "face" of your company to customers, prospects or other stakeholders, every profile on LinkedIn or other social networking sites is a marketing opportunity. While obviously allowing space for originality, every profile should include a compelling and consistent brand message (as well as links to the corporate website, blog, Twitter account, etc.).

7. Not monitoring.

One of the most significant aspects of social media is that it empowers others to share your message (or contradict it). You can't control every conversation about your brand in social media, but you can help shape them, or at least be seen as responsive in participating in them. Social media monitoring is imperative for understanding what's being said about your products or services, thanking your fans and responding to critics.

8. Ignoring synergy between different media.

Social media, your corporate website, PR activities and even online advertising don't exist in isolation from each other; the impact of all of these programs can be magnified by linking them wherever appropriate. Press releases should link to related content on your website or blog as well as to the profiles of anyone quoted. Your corporate website, email newsletters, even employee email signatures should link to your blog and Twitter account. Product microsites can be linked back to the corporate site or blog for additional information. Cross-linking between these different sites and sources raises your profile in search, maximizing your Web presence within your industry and product space.

Avoid these common mistakes, and you'll greatly enhance your company's success with social media.

Read more: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/5668/8-Common-Mistakes-in-B2B-Social-Media-Marketing.aspx#ixzz1PsxthYYI

The characteristics of interactive marketing communications

Through understanding the key interactive communications characteristics enabled through digital media we can exploit these media while guarding against their weaknesses. In this section, we will describe eight key changes in the media characteristics between traditional media and new media. The eight key changes in communications characteristics as marketers move from exploiting traditional to new media are:

1.      From push to pull. Traditional media such as Print, TV and Radio are push media, a one-way street where information is mainly unidirectional, from company to customer unless direct response elements are built-in. In contrast, the web is an example of a pull media. This is its biggest strength and its biggest weakness. It is strength since pull means that prospects and customers only visit a web site when it enters their head to do so –when they have a defined need – they are pro-active and self-selecting. But this is a weakness since online pull means marketers have less control than in traditional communications where the message is pushed out to a defined audience. What are the e-marketing implications of the pull medium? First, we need to provide the physical stimuli to encourage visits to web sites. This may mean traditional ads, direct mail or physical reminders. Second we need to ensure our site is optimized for search engines – it is registered and is ranked highly on relevant keyword searches. Third email is important – this is an online push medium, it should be a priority objective of web site design to capture customer’ s e-mail addresses in order that opt-in e-mail can be used to push relevant and timely messages to customers.

Push media: Communications are broadcast from an advertiser to consumers of the message who are passive recipients.

Pull media: The consumer is proactive in selection of the message through actively seeking out a web site.

2.     From monologue to dialogue: Creating a dialogue through interactivity is the next important feature of the web and new media. Since the Internet is a digital medium and communications are mediated by software on the web server that hosts the web content, this provides the opportunity for two-way interaction with the customer. This is a distinguishing feature of the medium (Peters, 1998). For example, if a registered customer requests information, or orders a particular product, it will be possible for the supplier to contact them in future using e-mail with details of new offers related to their specific interest. A web site, interactive digital TV and even a mobile phone all enable marketers to enter dialogue with customers. These can be short term – perhaps an online chat to customer support, or long-term, lifelong dialogues discussing product and supply requirements. These dialogues can enhance customer service, deepen relationships and trust and so build loyalty. But digital dialogues have a less obvious benefit also – intelligence. Interactive tools for customer self-help can help collect intelligence – click stream analysis recorded in the web log file can help us build up valuable pictures of customer preferences. If we profile customers, placing them into different segments then build a more detailed picture that is used to refine our products and offers.

Interactivity: The medium enables a dialogue between company and customer

3.      From one-to-many to one-to-some and one-to-one. Traditional push communications are one-to-many. From one company to many customers, often the same message to different segments and often poorly targeted. With new media ‘one-to-some’ – reaching a niche or micro-segment becomes more practical – e-marketers can afford to tailor and target their message to different segments through providing different site content or e-mail for different audiences through mass customisation. We can even move to one-to-one communications where personalised messages can be delivered according to customer preferences. The interactive nature of the Internet lends itself to establishing dialogues with individual customers. Thus potentially it is a one-to-one communication (from company to customer) rather than the traditional one-to-many communication (from company to customers) that is traditional in marketing using the mass media, such as newspapers or television.

4.      From one-to-many to many-to-many communications: New media also enable many-to-many communications.  Here customers can interact with other customers via your web site or in independent communities. The success of online auctions such as eBay also shows the power of many-to-many communications. However, online discussion groups represent a threat since it is difficult to control negative communications about a company.

5.       From ‘lean-back’ to ‘lean-forward’: New media are also intense media – they are lean-forward media in which the web site usually has the visitor’ s undivided attention. This intensity means that the customer wants to be in control and wants to experience flow and responsiveness to their needs. First impressions are important. If the visitor to your site does not find what they are looking for immediately, whether through poor design or slow speed they will move on, probably never to return.

6.     The medium changes the nature of standard marketing communications tools such as advertising: In addition to offering the opportunity for one-to-one marketing, the Internet can be, and is still widely used for one-to-many advertising. On the Internet the overall message from the advertiser becomes less important, and typically it is detailed information the user is seeking. The web site itself can be considered as similar in function to an advertisement (since it can inform, persuade and remind customers about the offering, although it is not paid for in the same way as a traditional advertisement).

7.      Increase in communications intermediaries: If we consider advertising and PR, with traditional media, this occurs through a potentially large number of media owners such as TV and radio channel owners and the owners of newspaper and print publications such as magazines. In the Internet era there is a vastly increased range of media owners or publishers through which marketers can promote their services and specifically gain links to their web site. Traditional radio channels, newspapers and print titles have migrated online, but in addition there are a vast number of online only publishers including horizontal portals   such as search engines and vertical portals such as industry specific sites. The online marketer needs to select the most appropriate of this plethora of sites which customers visit to drive traffic to their web site.

8.     Integration: Although new media have distinct characteristics compared to traditional media, this does not mean we should necessarily concentrate our communications solely on new media. Rather we should combine and integrate new and traditional media according to their strengths. We can then achieve synergy – the sum is greater than their parts. Most of us still spend most of our time in the real-world rather than the virtual world, so offline promotion of the proposition of a web site is important. It is also important to support mixed-mode buying. For example, a brand which raises awareness of the brand and then sees an advert in a print ad that directs him across to the web site for further information. However the customer does not want to buy online, preferring the phone, but the site allows for this by prompting with a phone number at the right time. Similarly inbound communications to a company need to be managed. Consider if the customer needs support for an error with their system. They may start by using the onsite diagnostics which do not solve the problem. They then ring customer support. This process will be much more effective if support staff can access the details of the problem as previously typed in by the customer to the diagnostics package.

Interactive Media for your Exhibition Stand

Allowing customers to really engage with your brand during an event can be achieved through interaction that stretches beyond face-to-face sales communications. Being a relatively new trend in online marketing tools, interactive features take the benefits of word of mouth but operate in the online environment. Often ‘forwarded’ to friends and colleagues, this marketing method is designed to encourage consumers to tell one another about a product, service or website via the engaging feature. Usually boosted with an incentive, these somewhat viral efforts are often designed to encourage visitors to engage with the interactive communication whilst parting with contact information in return for a voucher, discount or even free product.

Interactive promotional ‘flash’ games are one of the most popular ways to engage audiences before, during and after your event. They not only create elements of fun and light-hearted competition, but also powerful tools for generating traffic to your stand and website. | Choosing the interactive concept gives a good indication on how it will impact at your event, link with promotions and match your brand personality. Typical flash game designs such as jigsaw puzzle and catching formats are easy to integrate your brand and products into and link heavily with a competition or offer to encourage the user to remember your brand. On the opposite scale, spending a little more investment on creating a brand new gaming concept may have a much heavier impact using the game itself to attract attention and publicity for the brand.

Creating a suitable format to display the interactive content on your exhibition stand will naturally be different to a version applied to a web interface. If a competition or challenging game-play, people are more apprehensive about playing when others are watching, however using a small screen that only allows one person to be immersed isn’t very interesting for everyone else and nor are you able to effectively use the interactive element to create a hubbub at your stand. Games on location therefore need to provide a great spectator mode, with a relatively limited play sequence to prevent visitors waiting. Large touch screens built into custom display units offer a truly interactive and visual experience, but intimate control panels can be projected or synced with larger displays for a similar effect.

Gaining increased popularity, digital games that allow the user to play to win a prize or free product are responsible for a large proportion of data capture at events. This also applies to the application being available online pre and post show with users passing to friends and colleagues. This provides a constant stream of visitors to your website before and after your event boosting SEO (Search Engine Optimising) but more importantly increasing the exposure of your event.

Integrating this traditionally online marketing tool into your event environment brings digital interaction to your face-to-face communication. Creating a higher level of intrigue for your brand and products, interactive games allow your visitors to experience the personality of your brand, which can be reflected in the game play or presentation. Competitions and game-play make great talking points for your stand staff making it easier to attract attention and a smoother lead into conversation. However, in a conversation-saturated environment an interactive medium in which to receive information may offer a refreshing change to the visitor. You may find your interactive content to be your differentiator with visitors remembering you and thus being more receptive to your post-show and follow up communications.

There is then the opportunity after you event to direct your contacts back the your website via e-shot to announce winners of the game competition, leader board or even to play the game again online. Once at your website, visitors have the chance forward the game to friends and colleagues whilst being directed to other areas of your website, product information, promotions, and details about your brand following the information they received at the event. This activity increases the interaction with your brand outside of the event, converting the contact into a qualified lead or next step towards a purchase decision. 

Writing an exhibition plan

Planning is a necessary part of success. Careful and meticulous planning of your exhibition is no exception. It’s easy to underestimate how long it takes to properly plan for an exhibition and therefore you should be starting 4 – 6 months ahead of the show. For some companies with larger exhibition stands and a more complicated exhibiting schedule, planning may need to start up to 12 months in advance.

It’s quite simple – planning for your exhibition makes life so much easier! And it can help you avoid additional expenses and last minute panics. 

• Appoint an exhibition co-ordinator with overall responsibility
• Write an exhibition plan with key activities, dates and responsibilities
• Get everyone involved that needs to be – circulate a copy of the exhibition plan with responsibilities and then keep chasing them
• Stick to your deadlines

A written exhibition plan should provide:

• Objectives
• Time scales
• Budgets
• Space requirements
• Exhibition design parameters
• On-site services
• Transportation and logistics
• Staffing levels and training
• Pre- and post-show promotions
• Show evaluation criteria
• On-stand data capture
• Follow-up procedure for leads

Each part of the exhibition plan works together to create synergy and success.


“For more help and guidance with regard to Exhibiting or your Exhibition Stands andExhibition Design please contact "enKonversations - Interactive Marketing” 


www.enkonversations.com

Setting exhibition goals and objectives

When you are deciding to exhibit you need to be certain that the exhibition you have chosen fits into your overall sales and marketing strategy. 

Before you book your exhibition stand space, ask yourself the following questions:

• Why am I exhibiting at this show?
• What products/services will I be exhibiting?
• What do I want to accomplish?
• What will I be doing to achieve the results?
• What image do I want to project?
• How does this specific exhibition fit into my sales and marketing plan?

Your answers to these questions will help you form specific objectives that you need to establish to be a successful exhibitor. The objectives you set should be measurable and obtainable. You will find it much easier to measure and judge your success if you are specific with your objectives. For instance, you can set a specific number of show leads to generate, appointments to make, units to sell.

Your exhibition objectives can be as challenging as you want to make them, but remember you and your stand staff want to succeed, so be realistic, particularly if you’re exhibiting for the first time or setting show objectives for the first time.

There are 6 principle reasons why companies choose to exhibit:
• Build Sales
• Improve customer relationships
• Conduct market research
• Generate media relations/PR
• Build brand awareness
• Build and support sales channels

When you are setting your show objectives, consider each of the above to determine why you are going and what you want to achieve.

Can this show deliver on your objectives?
To find out, get as much information as possible about the exhibition you're considering.

• Ask the show organisers for a copy of last year's registration form and an attendee profile. This will tell you who you'll meet on the show floor and will help you match your target audience to the expected visitor audience
• Ask for the names of other confirmed exhibitors, and search the list for your competitors
• Ask past exhibitors and attendees what they liked and disliked about the show, and whether it met their buying and selling needs
• Ask show management how they plan to promote the show, and what they will do to help your ideal prospect find you there

Select the exhibition because you believe it can deliver on your show objectives not because your sales team thinks you should be there or because the show organisers tell you your competitors are there.

Knowing exactly what you want is a necessary element of success. Make sure that you understand your objectives. Make them SMART:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Timebound

Social Media Trends 2011

1. Social commerce. Social who? In short, you can now sell on Facebook by letting your customers buy, but also letting them tell their friends. And letting their friends tell their friends. Even if you don’t offer ecommerce on your website, it’s now possible to provide that service through the social network. And it’s overly simple to set up.

2. Group buying. You’ve heard of sites, such as Groupon, that sell for discounts if you get your friends to “group” together to buy a product or service? Based on the $1 billion price tag Groupon received earlier this year, expect them and like-minded sites (such as LivingSocial, YouSwoop, and ScoutMom) to continue to grow, offering you a new way to reach different audiences.

3. Q&A sites. It may seem crazy if you’re not a high user of the social platforms, but people are beginning to make real decisions based on recommendations from their virtual friends. Sites such as JustAnswer will begin to pop up, allowing people to ask a question and get real answers, from real people. The marketing possibilities become endless because you’ll begin to collect data from groups of people instead of one customer at a time.

4. Mobile. It’s no surprise our phones are becoming like third hands for most of us or that we’re eons behind Asian countries on how we use them. But we’re beginning to catch on and move toward abandoning our laptops for phones. Watch for movement toward mobile payments and begin thinking about how to accept payments via an application on the phone.

So, other than content, customer engagement, net neutrality, FTC rules, social commerce, group buying, Q&A sites, and mobile, what trends are you seeing, using technology, for 2011?

Social Media Strategy Trends

At a recent panel at BlogWorld Expo 2010, as the panel discussed where they saw corporate social-media strategy heading, three prominent trends emerged:

·         Listening to your customers is great — but reaching out to them is better. Right now, most companies’ crisis-communications strategies are modeled on the 24-hour news cycle, Companies know a story can break at any moment and they need to be ready to respond. The problem with this plan is that no matter how fast a company’s reaction time is, they’re still waiting on customers to get angry before staffers get involved, and by that point, it may be too late to avoid an incident.
Great customer service is the best crisis-communications strategy, because great service can keep uproars from happening. Firms should make staff available to answer questions and talk with customers before they become truly disgruntled, user forums are a great place to start doing this.

·        No one department can control social media. Who owns social media in your organization? Is it public relations? Marketing? Human resources? While plenty of companies are facing internal power struggles over the answer to this question, in the future it’ll be a nonissue, as social media becomes less of a coveted resource and more of a tool that all employees uses to do their jobs.
Leading organizations may have a top-down approach now, but they’ll soon move to a hub-and-spoke model, in which all departments are responsible for social communications in their areas of expertise. Soon, asking who controls all of an organization’s social media will be like asking who is in charge of all its writing, he added.

·         Listening doesn’t mean forgetting who’s in charge. One thing all the panelists seemed to agree on was that companies need to understand that their social-media fans are a subset of their customers — and not necessarily a representative sample. Much of the later part of the panel was devoted to handling packaging and logo mishaps. Companies bear responsibility for making sure that complaints they respond to truly represent how the bulk of their customers feel — not just a vocal minority. Feedback is not a substitute for judgment.

Leveraging the event content

Generating valuable content is dream of every marketer but how you use the content is more important. Following are the 5 ways of using content effectively…

1. Sell it - If attendees are willing to pay for the content live, there is no reason why you can’t find customers to consume that content online. The secret here is price and delivery. Companies tend to think the same content online is worth the same as it is live. It’s not. It is a completely different user experience, and the value one gets from the live event is very different than the online version. You should price it accordingly, then cut the price you think it’s worth in half…then in half again.

2. Give it away - This is the foundation of most freemium models out there. If the content has a short life span, give it away after the conference as a way to build your brand and sell prospects to the next event in the cycle. Tie it into registration for the next conference. Register for this year and get the full video from the last conference free.

3. Transcribe it - Text based content can provide you with additional distribution outlets. You can turn a 60 minute presentation into a white paper, a handout at an event, or a series of press releases.

4. Social media - With great speakers, you can cut up a 60 minute presentation into five to ten 3-5 minute clips. Build up your YouTube channel or get it up on your website. These short bursts of information are great content for most social media sites.

5. Promotion - What better way to sell the next edition of your event than with great content from the last event. Cut speakers and thoughts from different presentations into a great promotional clip. If you’ve got a camera crew onsite, they can collect plenty of B-Roll for you. Interviews, testimonials, etc.

Event Focus 2011

One Priority that Event Marketers Need to Focus on this Year:

1. Retention

Given the year the economy – and in turn the events industry – has been through, it is time for Event Marketing leaders to strategize and make an investments in developing and implementing strong attendee retention strategies. In many cases, event marketing has been in “churn mode” for too long – continually putting time, effort and investment into attendee acquisition activities without a plan in place to manage attendees post-event. Part of this is understandable – managing the frequency and volume of events from a marketing perspective is a daunting proposition. However, now is the time to develop, execute and – most importantly – stick with – a retention strategy to ensure long-term survival.

Why now? A couple of reasons:

1. Cost – although there is not a set metric in place, it is more expensive to acquire a prospect than it is to retain them – in other words, bringing a cold prospect through the entire AIDA cycle costs more than a person who is already beyond, at least, the Attention/Interest phases. (Tracking and testing the cost per attendee without any retention initiatives in place vs. how the initiatives impact the cost is also important – if nothing else, as an internal benchmark.)

2. Reputation – A retention program in place will re-focus your communication channels so that they map to the various audience segments you define. As you learn more about your attendees – their functionality, buying patterns, needs, etc. – and develop actions around this knowledge, it will lead to their receiving and (hopefully) registering for future events via the channel and timing they prefer – and will decrease push communications and, by extension, challenges around today's SPAM prevalent environment. Having a program in place will also, almost by definition, ensure a new focus placed on the customer/attendee - pre-event, onsite, and post event, cross-functionally various stakeholders should be working to ensure there is a renewed urgency on customer satisfaction (especially if the emphasis on Retention is coming driven top-down!) if the strategy is to encourage them to come back next year/for another event.

3. Most importantly, The Tools are There: Database modeling services have been with us for a while; however, over the past year Social Media had developed into something that can provide Event Marketers with a number of tools to effectively incorporate into a retention strategy. Facebook fan pages and groups, LinkedIn groups, Webinars, communities built with Ning, YouTube, Twitter, Slideshare, etc. are some of the portals that can be utilized to share information and knowledge and keep your contacts abreast of your content and activities. (Of course, traditional offline and email channels are part of the mix as well.)

How you do it is up to you – but the timing is right for you to plan and execute on this. And do plan for the long-term – results, by definition, will not be immediate, but will be worthwhile.

Create a positive attendee and exhibitor experience

Here are four thoughts, strategies and tactics you can – and should – be utilizing to leading up to an event help you ultimately, deliver a positive attendee and exhibitor experience:

1. Event Marketers need to be engaged in the earliest phases of the planning cycle. You need to be on board in understanding and contributing to content formulation to ensure it aligns to the target market you are responsible for recruiting. Content is King: if you are seeking to attract VP-level attendees but content and sessions are addressing tactical topics … the VP you are targeting will see this and will send his subordinates. Game over.

2. Best practice: Monitor. Make it a point to regularly review reports to ensure registrations are fitting the mold both in volume and demographics. Understand your registration patterns and continually analyze where registrations are coming from. If there is a list, internal segment, social media source or channel that is drawing too many or too few of the right/wrong attendee, be nimble enough to react.

3. Work with your sponsors. This takes time and effort, but working with exhibitors – in coordination with your sales team – to engage them in reaching out to their contacts is important. There is certainly pushback and challenges around executing these efforts, including “why would I want my client on the show floor where my competitors are?” The message should be around your seamlessly working to invite their prospects - the message being “Wouldn’t you like that prospect that’s been in your pipeline for six months at the event?”

1. 4.      Leverage Team Send. Develop an incentive: once you have a “good” contact registered, engage them in inviting others. Pending bandwidth, this is a great opportunity to roll out the “white glove” approach to people who have committed to your event. A phone call or personalized note is both a great CRM effort and works toward building ancillary attendance.

Social Media Strategy Trends

At a recent panel at BlogWorld Expo 2010, as the panel discussed where they saw corporate social-media strategy heading, three prominent trends emerged:

·         Listening to your customers is great — but reaching out to them is better. Right now, most companies’ crisis-communications strategies are modeled on the 24-hour news cycle, Companies know a story can break at any moment and they need to be ready to respond. The problem with this plan is that no matter how fast a company’s reaction time is, they’re still waiting on customers to get angry before staffers get involved, and by that point, it may be too late to avoid an incident.
Great customer service is the best crisis-communications strategy, because great service can keep uproars from happening. Firms should make staff available to answer questions and talk with customers before they become truly disgruntled, user forums are a great place to start doing this.

·         No one department can control social media. Who owns social media in your organization? Is it public relations? Marketing? Human resources? While plenty of companies are facing internal power struggles over the answer to this question, in the future it’ll be a non issue, as social media becomes less of a coveted resource and more of a tool that all employees uses to do their jobs.
Leading organizations may have a top-down approach now, but they’ll soon move to a hub-and-spoke model, in which all departments are responsible for social communications in their areas of expertise. Soon, asking who controls all of an organization’s social media will be like asking who is in charge of all its writing, he added.

·         Listening doesn’t mean forgetting who’s in charge. One thing all the panelists seemed to agree on was that companies need to understand that their social-media fans are a subset of their customers — and not necessarily a representative sample. Much of the later part of the panel was devoted to handling packaging and logo mishaps. Companies bear responsibility for making sure that complaints they respond to truly represent how the bulk of their customers feel — not just a vocal minority. Feedback is not a substitute for judgment.