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Websites, Content and Social Media – the B2B Online Marketing Jigsaw

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There are many parts to your B2B online marketing jigsaw. And like any other jigsaw, if you look at one piece in isolation it can be hard to make sense of it. To know where it fits you need to have the bigger picture.

B2B online marketing

Online marketing – wondering where the pieces fit?

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This seems to be one of the commonest difficulties people have with online and content marketing; people will pick up a single piece, like blogging or Twitter, for example, and try to work out what they need to do with it, without understanding how it fits with their overall approach. So, let’s tip out your B2B online marketing jigsaw box and see what pieces we have.

Actually, before we tip out the pieces, we’d better have a good look at the lid. This is the picture we’re trying to construct. The purpose of marketing is to understand your market, to work out ways of providing what that market wants, and to promote your solutions. Too many companies focus their marketing, particularly their online marketing, almost exclusively on the third of these elements. The big picture of your B2B online marketing should take all of these into consideration.

Piece 1 – Your Website

For most businesses a website will be a central feature of their online marketing. There are plenty of options for getting this set up and the one you choose will depend on a number of factors:

  • Budget
  • Your IT skills
  • Your design skills

If you are setting up your business and need some ideas on how to get a website set up, have a look HERE.

However you set it up, your website will probably be the foundation of your online marketing. It is the one place where somebody can find all of your products and services, your business philosophy, your key marketing messages, testimonials and your contact details. Serious business customers will make a judgement about you based on how your website looks and what it says. The main priorities are to have content which connects with your audience and helps them find what they need.

There’s usually no problem with convincing a business that they need a website. It seems to be a standard feature of the business set up check-list. The biggest danger with the check-list state of mind is that a website can become mainly informational – without businesses thinking through the precise role that they want it to play in generating more sales.

Piece 2 – Your Blog

While the need for a website seems obvious, blogging in B2B online marketing can be more of a puzzle. Through blogging you are trying to demonstrate that you have something interesting to say about the things your customers care about. Through your blogging strategy you are seeking to build awareness of your capabilities and build trust in your organisation. With each post you are progressively building your profile as people who have the experience, understanding and skills to deliver the solutions your target customers are looking for.

B2B purchase decisions are rarely ‘spur of the moment’. Businesses take time to weigh up potential suppliers before deciding where to spend their money. Through skilful blogging, which isn’t trying to sell, you will be building relationships with potential customers well in advance of the purchase decision. You even have an opportunity to influence the customer’s decision about what it is they need. On the other hand, you could always just hope that your sales brochure turns up on their desk at exactly the right moment.

The secret is to write something that they will want to read – which means writing it from their perspective rather than yours.

Piece 3 – SEO and B2B Online Marketing

Understand your target market and understand the things they type into Google. Once you understand this you can include the most relevant keywords in your content to ensure it gets found by the people you want to find it. Another powerful reason for blogging is that you can create content optimised for a wider range of more specific searches than you could with just a brochure website. The purpose of B2B online marketing is to use the internet to reach a wider range of potential customers than you could through traditional marketing. Incorporating the most effective keywords into your content is essential – do you know what yours are?

Your web developer should help you with the SEO on your site and a copywriter certainly will when they produce the content. If you use WordPress for your blog and/or your website, install a good all-in-one SEO plug-in.

A Whole Load of Pieces Called Social Media

The nature of your business and the people you are trying to reach will determine the social media tools you use. LinkedIn is often the easiest to grasp in B2B as it seems a natural extension of face-to-face networking. I also recommend Twitter, which can be harder to grasp but very powerful when you get it right.

Whatever tools you use: Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Google+, etc etc, just remember the focus is on engagement, not on selling. Social media tools can help a wider range of people find your content. You can also use carefully curated content from other experts to demonstrate that you understand the needs of your audience. Social networks are also a great place to deepen your understanding of what the market needs.

And a Load of Other Pieces Called Content

I focused on blogging above but there are many content alternatives: video, slideshares, infographics, photos. The same rules apply though: it’s about building awareness, engagement and winning trust; it’s not about pumping out sales messages. You can also use specific pieces of content (eg white papers, e-books) to collect contact details that you can use in targeted email marketing: better to send your emails to people who have shown an interest rather than a list you bought somewhere.

So, if you’re struggling to understand how to get results from a particular aspect of content marketing, try looking at it in the context of the bigger picture: how you understand what your customers want and how you make them aware that you are the people they can trust to deliver the solution.

Richard Hussey

I’m a copywriter and content marketing specialist based in South West England. Call me on 01823 674167 to see how I can help you win more business. Click on the ‘Follow’ tab to have future posts delivered straight to your inbox. 

See more: content marketing South West

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Does Your Business Blog Have an Identity Crisis?

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The best business blogs are not necessarily the most grammatically perfect and may not even be the ones with the most finely-honed copywriting. The critical factor is having a distinct identity and a personality. As more businesses take up blogging, how will yours stand out from the crowd – with the distinct identity you need to build a loyal readership? By identity I don’t mean how your blog looks, but what it has to say.

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Originality is the key to effective business blogging

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The proliferation of business blogs means that we’re not short of information sources.  For pretty well any business topic, whether it’s marketing, finance, IT, HR or PR, you’ll find plenty of words of explanation on any number of blog sites. Yes, people want to be informed, but getting people to engage fully and regularly with your blog needs more than just informational content.

Business Blogs Need Personality

So what makes a successful blog site? One that people will subscribe to and one where they’ll make the effort to click on a link that pops up in Twitter or LinkedIn feeds? The ‘personality’ of your blog is critical.

The personality of your blog is partly to do with the writing style: friendly, easy to read content always wins over self-important and preachy stuff. This isn’t always easy for people to do but there are plenty of copywriters who can turn your thoughts into readable copy if that’s not your thing. Most importantly, it’s what you have to say and how that resonates with your audience.

A major reason for business blogs failing to generate a return on the time and effort that goes into creating them, is that businesses don’t work out their key messages: the fundamental views and values that underpin their blogging strategy. Once you understand these it’s much easier to identify the topics that you need to blog about and what you want those blog articles to say. Without these fundamentals you’re likely to end up just posting more information into a crowded space in the hope of establishing some kind of on-line presence.

Insight and Originality

Factual and informative articles are fine but they don’t engage. What your audience is looking for is your personal take on the subject. Rather than just describe something, think about the implications for your customers; pose some additional, relevant questions that they might not have thought about. Aim to help your audience develop their understanding. Be thought-provoking and even controversial if the situation calls for it. Above all, add your personal insight to every topic.

I have a feeling that one reason so many blogs fail to establish an identity is that the authors aren’t clear about who they are writing for. Business blogs should always be planned and written with a defined audience in mind. If you understand who you are writing for you can work out the following:

  • the subjects they’re really going to be interested in
  • how those subjects relate to their lives or businesses

The key is understanding not just whether they will be interested but why they will be interested.

Good blogging is about interpretation and analysis rather than just passing on information. You don’t want your blog to be like the boring bloke down the pub who knows lots of things but has nothing interesting or original to say about any of them.

Business Blogs: Give Them a Reason to Return

People have a reason to come back to your blog if you’ve helped them think a bit more deeply about something. Develop their thinking and level of understanding and they’ll decide that it’s worth paying a return visit. But if you just give them the same information they could get on a dozen other sites, they might try one of those next time.

 

RIchard Hussey is the founder of RSH Copywriting, Devon. Copywriting, web content and content marketing for SMEs in the South West. Call me on 01823 674167.

See more: copywriter Devon

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Blogging for Business Part 3 – Planning Your Content

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When I’m talking to people about starting a business blog one of the most common barriers people put up is ‘I don’t know what I can write about – my business isn’t interesting enough to generate regular new content.’ I’ve yet to find a business where this was true and for which blogging couldn’t be done effectively.

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Effective blogging is about finding engaging messages

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There’s a group of people out there who will be interested in what you do, they’re called customers. If they weren’t interested in what you do they wouldn’t be your customers. And there are other people who have similar interests to your customers but are not yet doing business with you. The first step towards a blogging plan is to look at your blog from these people’s perspective, rather than from an internal viewpoint.

It’s easy to become focused on this internal perspective. We naturally devote a lot of energy into thinking about how to do things better and day to day problem solving. You can lose sight of the things that you already know that other people would find useful and on the beneficial effects of what you do on other people’s lives or businesses.

So here are a few steps you can go through to help develop your blogging plan.

1. Identify your blogging targets

It’s unlikely that your target audience will be homogeneous. In most cases you can break your customers down by size or business sector, for example. It’s important to do this as the issues and challenges they face will differ. The more you can refine the picture of what your customers ‘look like’, the more you will be able to target content specifically at each sub group.

Think carefully too about the bits of your business that you really want to grow. You only have so much time to create and publish content, so make sure you focus on products or services that have a profitable future and on the people who are likely to have enough money to buy them.

2. Think about their issues and challenges

For each group of customers you identify, make a list of issues and challenges that they face. What’s going to be keeping them awake at night? Then write down alongside each of these points the ways in which what you do helps overcome those issues and challenges.

3. Themes and key messages

Having identified your audience, what matters to them, and how you can help, you are well on the way to a content plan. By this stage loads of potential blog topics are usually popping into your mind. But before you start writing it’s also worth thinking about some overarching messages; these may be specific to each group of customers. Think of it as an overall impression you want to convey through your content. Here are some examples:

We can make their life simpler

We can help them be more efficient

We can help them get more business

You should also consider the specific values that you have in your business. Is your marketing based on the customer service you offer, price, specialist knowledge, skills, or is your approach to business in some way unique? It’s worth documenting these values as a reminder that you want to reinforce them with each new piece of content.

4. Who and when

Having been through the above processes you should have a list of blog articles that you intend to publish. At this stage it will probably just be a list of topics, themes and messages for each customer group. Now comes the slightly dull but absolutely crucial bit. You need to plan when each article will be published and who is going to produce it. As a minimum you want to be clear about what you will be putting out over the next 3-6 months.

The plan doesn’t need to be elaborate (in fact it’s often a case of the simpler the better), but it needs to be a plan. Blogging should be an important element of your marketing mix and you need some structure to avoid it being overwhelmed by more urgent issues.

The plan should also include time to review the effectiveness of the blogging strategy. I’ll say more about how you can use analytics to improve the results you get from blogging in a later article.

5. Spread the word

The other feature in your plan should be to identify the networks you will use to disseminate your articles. If it’s LinkedIn, think about the specific discussion groups that would be most relevant. You also want to consider whether the blogs and social media posting will be from the company or from an individual. Above all, be clear about who will be posting the articles and where they will go.

6. And finally, be flexible

Effective blogging is often about being topical. So don’t be afraid to deviate from your publishing plan if urgent and relevant issues come up in the news. Beware of coming across as opportunistic, however. There were some ghastly examples on Twitter of people trying to hijack the news of the recent hurricane in America as a marketing opportunity.

Hopefully you’ve now got a clearer idea of how you can come up with suitable things to blog about. Next time I’ll be discussing some tips for making your articles more engaging and effective.

Richard Hussey

If you missed the first 2 parts of this series, here they are. They’ll help you decide on your blogging platform and give you some tips to help get your blogging site up and running.

Part 1 - Getting started

Part 2, SEO Sharing and Statistics

I’m the founder of RSH Copywriting which is based near the Devon, Somerset border. I help businesses across a wide range of sectors including IT, training and healthcare to use written content to win more business.

 

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Blogging for Business – SEO, Sharing and Statistics

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Welcome to part 2 of a series of articles on the basics of effective blogging for business. Last time I discussed setting up a blogging site using WordPress. Now we’re going to look at how you equip your blog with the tools to help get your content noticed and shared.

WordPress blogging

Using the right plug-ins means people can see you, hear about you and talk about you.

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You’ll remember that we discussed whether it’s best to have a site hosted at wordpress.com or to download the framework from wordpress.org and host your own site. If you’re still thinking about how to set up a site you might want to refer back before reading on: Blogging for Business Part 1.

Hosting your own blog allows you much more freedom to control what it does by installing plug-ins. Inevitably I’m going to be talking more about self-hosted sites as there is so much less flexibility and less to say about .com sites. But I’ll also point out things you can do if you’re using wordpress.com to host your blog.

WordPress Plug-ins

Installing a plug-in is simple. Down the left margin of the dashboard you’ll find the word Plugins (I wish they’d hyphenate it). Roll the mouse cursor over this and you will see options including ‘Installed Plugins’, ‘Add New’, and ‘Editor’. You don’t need to worry too much about ‘Editor’.

To install a plug-in, click on ‘Add New’. You can then use the search functionality to find what you want. For example, type SEO into the search box and you will get a list of the SEO plug-ins with star ratings, brief information and a link to reviews. I would also recommend doing a bit of research on Google to see what people think of the various options before you decide. When you’ve picked the one you want, click install and it’s done. In most cases It really is that simple. Sometimes a bit of extra configuration is required but this is usually straightforward.

Get Yourself Noticed

The point of blogging is to use content to get noticed by a wider range of people. There are two main ways to do this: search and sharing.

Optimising your blog for search engines is critical and there are several excellent Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) plug-ins to choose from. The one I use is the WordPress  SEO by Yoast. This provides a simple way to improve the optimisation of all the posts and pages on your blog. Once you’ve decided on your key word or phrase you get an analysis of how effectively you have used it, with suggestions for how optimisation can be improved. You can write an SEO title and description that will appear in the Google search results page and see the preview of this ‘snippet’ appear as you type.

A simple traffic light indicator shows whether your SEO is ‘green for go’.

Sharing

The next critical thing is making it easy for people to share your content. Again there are several excellent plug-ins that you can find by typing ‘social media’ or something similar into the ‘Add New’ plugins search window. In one way or another these will all add buttons to your posts and pages so that people can use a single click to send your post to Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, or whatever you decide is most appropriate.

I use the Shareaholic plug-in, but there are plenty of alternatives. It might be worth experimenting to see how the sharing buttons look on your screen before making a final choice. Make sure that you have this in place before you start blogging as there’s no point publishing content that it’s difficult for people to share.

For wordpress.com sites you can find a ‘sharing’ option from the Settings menu (again, down the left margin of the dashboard). Here you’ll find an option to add sharing buttons for the most common social media tools. You can also set up links to post automatically to your social media accounts.

Blogging – Keeping track

Tracking the traffic to your site is vital. You want to be able to see how many people visited your site as a result of each post you put out. This way you can evaluate the topics, headlines and the times of posting that are most effective.

Google analytics will also tell you where visitors come from so you can see which social media tools are most effective. You’ll also know how many are new visitors, how many returning, how long they spend on your site and any other pages they visited. This is all marketing gold.

Track, evaluate and learn. I use the Google Analytics for WordPress tool but it’s largely a matter of choice. You will also need to visit the Google Analytics site to get a tracking code for your blog in order to set this up. It’s a bit of effort but well worth it.

For wordpress.com sites you are restricted to using the standard WordPress analytics tool. This will give you basic information on the number of hits your site is getting.

Other Plug-ins

Once you see how easy it is to install plug-ins you’ll find loads of other things you can do. I won’t try to cover everything here but here’s just a few to think about:

Security. I would install a security package to protect your site from malicious software attacks. Again, there are several options. Once you’ve installed one your site will be safe from hackers.

Spam. Your Comments box can quickly get overrun by spammers. The Akismet plug-in will sort that out immediately. You’ll need to visit the Akismet site to register and get a key to activate the plug-in. It’s quite simple and very effective.

Pictures. Images give your posts impact. Compfire allows you to browse Flikr and download Creative Commons licensed photos together with the appropriate credit for the creator.  This is one of my favourite plug-ins.

Hopefully that’s given you plenty to think about for now. Next time we’ll look at the really important business of developing a content plan.

Richard Hussey is the founder of RSH Copywriting which supports businesses in Devon, Somerset and across the South West to market themselves more effectively using written content. See our main website.

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The Skill Every Blogger Neeeds

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What makes a good blog post? Beautifully crafted words? An irresistible headline? Humour? While all of these matter, the fundamental quality of any good blog post is that it has to appeal to a defined audience. People have complete freedom to ignore the words that you’ve spent hours hunched over your keyboard drafting and honing – so you’d better be writing about something they care about.

So what’s my top skill for effective blogging? LISTENING.

Blogging be inquisitive and pay attention

Listening is the key to great blogging

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Every conversation is an opportunity to learn

A champion blogger doesn’t see networking events as opportunities to promote their business and collect orders. They will see an opportunity to interact with business people and learn more about the issues and concerns they have. Nothing new in this, it’s what good marketers have always done – understand your market and adapt your offer to meet the need. These conversations are also a rich mine of potential blog topics.

A champion blogger approaches social media in the same way. Twitter and LinkedIn are not just convenient free tools for pushing out our sales messages, they are golden opportunities to interact with a wider audience and see how the world looks through their eyes.

Make connections

Focus on building your understanding of the things that are bothering people and the challenges their businesses face. You’ll then start making the connection to the ways that you can help them and the issues that will get their attention. Understand those connections and you’re well on the way to an effective blogging strategy.

I promise you that if you start looking at blogging and networking in this way you’ll never be stuck for something to blog about.

Thinking about starting a blog and not sure where to start? I’m publishing a series of articles covering the basics of setting up a blog and using content to grow your business. The first article is HERE

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Blogging For Business – Getting Started

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This is the first in a series of articles aimed at businesses that want to start blogging as part of their marketing strategy. There are loads of reasons why you should do this but the main ones are:

  • Improving your website SEO with regular content updates
  • Reaching more potential customers through the internet
  • Proving your expertise and knowledge through customer-focused articles
  • Building your reputation and trust
get started with business blogging

On your marks, get set, start blogging.

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Through these articles I’ll help you understand how to set up a blog, how to decide what to write about, and how to get your message out there. The good news is that there are great free blogging tools to help you and it’s all a lot less complicated than you might think.

Setting up a blog site

The first thing you will need is somewhere to create, store and publish your content. The most popular tools are Google’s Blogger and WordPress. I’m a confirmed WordPress devotee and it’s what I recommend to all of my clients – so that’s what I’m going to focus on. It’s easy to use, flexible and powerful. I’m sure Blogger is great too but I’ve never used it.

There are two options for setting up a WordPress site. You can either have a site hosted by wordpress.com or you can host your own. WordPress.com is the simplest option but there are a few trade-offs.

WordPress.com sites

If you want a basic site and are happy to have a blog address that is something like rshcopywriting/wordpress.com, then you can be up and running in minutes at no cost. If you want an individual design, customised domain and so on you can still be up and running quickly with .com and the cost will be $100 – $150 per year depending on what offers are running. If you’re not a confident IT user and don’t want to spend time maintaining your site .com could be for you. It’s not a perfect solution (I’ll explain why in a minute) but it’s a lot better than doing nothing.

Here’s the link to wordpress.com

Self-hosted blogs

A more powerful option is to host your own site using wordpress.org, which is a fully open source solution. The .org option gives you more flexibility for how your site looks and the options you have for sharing your content and optimising it for search engines.  Also, because you are hosting the blog on your own domain you can integrate it with your brochure website so that you benefit more directly from the internet traffic and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) that your blog creates.

Look at my blog address above and you’ll see that it is rshcopywriting/Blog. Any traffic I generate is going to my domain.

If you have a website, your existing developer/host should be able to help you get set up without a huge cost. If you don’t already have a website you could consider using WordPress for everything. WordPress recommends several hosting companies that have a ‘one click’ installation. Pay your hosting fee (usually a few dollars per month), choose your domain name, click the button and you’re ready to start building your site. Here’s a link to the hosts that WordPress recommends:

WordPress recommended hosts

You can add pages to your blog so that it looks just like a ‘normal’ website and I know several smaller companies who have decided to use this option rather than paying a website design company. Similarly some web designers use WordPress to create cost-effective sites with a content management system rather than building from scratch.

Themes, Widgets and Plug-ins

You will get an admin login for your blog which will take you to the ‘dashboard’. The dashboard allows you to add and edit pages and posts, and control everything that your blog does. This applies to .com and self-hosted but you get a lot more options with self hosting.

The first job is usually to select your theme. This controls the look and feel of the site (colours, fonts etc). There are several free themes available to give you plenty of choice. Be careful to use something from a reputable source to make sure your site works properly. There are also themes that you can buy for a modest annual cost. Look at any user feedback before deciding. Again, self hosting gives you more options for controlling the appearance of your site.

Another option you will see with self-hosting is ‘Widgets’. These allow you to add little bits of functionality to your blog. If you want a calendar, index of topics, weblinks or text displayed in a sidebar or footer, you can achieve this easily by dragging widgets around the dashboard screen.

You then have a range of options to include plug-ins for the important functions on your blogging site. I’ll say more about these next time but the essential ones are for social sharing, SEO and security. There’s an an easy to use search function so finding suitable plug-ins is simple.

Hopefully this introduction has encouraged you to give blogging a go – it really is worth the effort. If you get stuck I’d be happy to help. Just use the contact tab on this page.

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Why Blogging is Good for Business

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There are many reasons why a blog should be an essential feature in your marketing strategy. Here are a few that I have found to be the most important.

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Your blog shows how much you know

If you tried to put everything you know and every detail of what you can do into a standard brochure website, you’d end up with a huge site that would be hard to navigate. Blog posts are small focused articles that expand on different aspects of what you do and allow you to go into more detail.  If you use a content management system such as WordPress the content is easily indexed using categories and tags so that people can find what they want. The point here is to show, not just how much you know about your own business, but how much you know about your customers’ business.

A repository of good quality blog posts can also be used to answer customer queries and follow up specific conversations that you might have had at a networking meeting.

Your blog shows how much you care

A well written blog article is not just a publicity puff for your business. To be effective it must contain information that is of value to other people. Often this means giving away a bit of your knowledge for nothing, which can take a bit of getting used to. If you don’t do this there is no value to the reader and no incentive for them to read or share your content.

The fact that you take the time and trouble to understand the challenges that other businesses are facing, and to produce content to help them meet those challenges, says that you care. Sincerity is the key. If you are a business that genuinely cares about what your customers are doing you will probably find it easier to find suitable blog subjects. You can always hire somebody to turn your ideas into engaging copy if that’s not something you’re good at or you lack the time.

Your blog helps you build relationships with future customers

In business, timing can be everything. People don’t always need your services immediately. A well designed blogging strategy will nurture relationships so that you become the natural choice when the time comes to make a purchase decision.  Without useful regular content you could be starting from the back of the grid rather than pole position.

To illustrate, imagine you run a care home. It’s not unusual for old people to be cared for by relatives for some time before going into a home. A care home that is providing you with useful information on caring for the elderly and supporting you through what can be a difficult time is nurturing a relationship. It’s also saying ‘we are concerned that elderly people receive good care, whether they are our residents or not.’ How’s that for a brand value?

None of this is a marketing trick or clever ploy. You are earning people’s trust, and their business, by helping them in a meaningful way.

Your blog makes your web content dynamic

How often do you find that your website content gets out of date and doesn’t fully reflect your business? That’s why I always recommend periodic content reviews on brochure websites to keep things fresh.  When you combine this approach with a blog, you are continuously adding new content, keeping your on-line presence live and dynamic. I talked about the dangers of web content that never changes in this recent post.

Without content that is continuously refreshed you are missing opportunities to let people know about all of the things you can do for them. Also, people make a judgement about companies with web content that is obviously out of date.

And finally, your blog will get you noticed

New blog posts give you a reason to contact people, whether this is through social media or ‘old fashioned’ email, there’s always something new for people to read and hopefully share. If your posts are properly optimised for search engines and you use social media your content will reach a much wider audience than you realise.

And, of course, Google loves content that is continuously updated and it loves content that is shared. Forget page 1 if you don’t have a blogging strategy, need I say more.

So what are you waiting for? Get blogging.

 

Have you used a blog to grow your business?

It would be great to share your experiences of how blogging has helped you grow your business through the comment section below.

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High Value Blogging

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Growth strategies and content marketing plans can sometimes be complex. Often you need a much simpler statement to help you focus on what really matters when you’re making day-to-day decisions. Here’s mine: I focus on giving my customers something they value and then look for more customers and give them something they value also.

content marketing needs direction

Does your content marketing lack direction?

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OK, I know the above approach sounds a bit like those trite maxims, loved by business gurus, that you see littered all over Twitter. But focusing in this way helps to guide business development and provide a direction for content marketing.

If you’re lucky or talented enough to have invented a killer product or service, a marketing message should be simple to create.  If I’d invented a car that performs like a Ferrari and runs for a thousand miles on a litre of petrol, I wouldn’t need to think too hard about how I’m going to market it. For most of us it’s a bit more tricky.

Content marketing: focus on value

If you’re stuck for things to blog about, have a think about how you add value to your customers. Write some blog posts about how people can add value to their business or lives by using the things you provide.  So, if I were in the Customer Relationship Management systems business I would be illustrating, in a multitude of ways, how a structured approach to prospecting and communicating with potential clients works much better than an uncoordinated scatter-gun approach, without overtly saying ‘buy my CRM system’ (that’s called advertising).

Content marketing: focus on the future

Thinking about the customers you want to have in the future also helps give you a focus. It clearly makes sense to focus your content creation around the needs of the customers you want to have.

You might also want to centre your content creation around the products and services that you think will be your most profitable lines in the future, rather than now.  How much effort do you want to put into marketing lines that will show gradually decreasing margins?

So, if you want a focus to help you decide what content you should be creating and sharing, think about these 3 questions:

1. What do we do that our customers particularly value, why do they value it?

2. What sort of customers do we want to win, what will they value?

3. Which of our products or services do we most want to promote?

This may sound simple, and I make no apology for that. Working through the detail will still require serious thought. Compare this to the approach you often see, with people jumping onto a blogging and content marketing bandwagon without too much thought of what they want to get from all this activity, other than vague notions of increased profile or unspecified new business opportunities.

Other posts you might find interesting:

Don’t let content marketing suck up all your time.

How content marketing leads to sales

PS. If you want regular, well written content for your marketing activities have a look at my monthly budget plan options HERE

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Make Selling Easier Through Content Marketing and Social Media

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Content MarketingAre you unclear about what content marketing or inbound marketing mean? Are you wondering what a social media strategy looks like?  Think of them in terms of what you already know about a fairly classical sales process, and you’ll see that you’re better placed than you think to harness these emerging techniques.

Sales Process 1: Get noticed

Any business needs a way to be found by potential customers. Historically this would be through networking, advertising, trade shows etc. Don’t stop doing these if they are working for you. Social Media tools like LinkedIn, Twitter etc offer more opportunities to get noticed and to build relationships that could lead to a sale. Joining the right on-line groups and monitoring Twitter hashtags that relate to your industry are great ways to build awareness of what you do.

Be careful to observe etiquette and understand that people are resistant to tweets that are overtly trying to sell. Think of it like being at a trade show. When somebody comes on to your stand you normally have a conversation about what they do and what you do. You don’t start selling the second you meet them.

Get known through your marketing content

Rich content is increasingly important for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), which will also get you noticed if you have a clear understanding of how potential customers will search for you. Creating new content and pushing this out through social media keeps you in people’s minds and builds your credibility (if your content is good and relevant, that is).

Also, if your content is useful, people may want to share it with other people in their industry. This is the ideal scenario as others are effectively marketing what you do. Get this right and potential customers will be contacting you rather than the other way round.

If you’re blogging on WordPress install the All in One SEO plug-in to make sure you get found by anyone looking for information on your chosen blog topics. Make it easy for people to share your content by using one of the many plug-ins, such as Shareaholic, which automatically adds email and social sharing buttons to your posts.

Sales Process 2: Qualification

A potential customer has become aware that you offer something of interest. They then want a bit more information about your business to be sure that you’re really worth talking to. Who have you worked with? What’s your service like? Do you really know what you are talking about? Here’s where content-based marketing offers big advantages. How many face-to-face meetings has it traditionally taken to establish your credibility? Build a relationship through providing useful, relevant content through blogs, emails, video blogs or an ‘old fashioned’ brochure website – whatever media your customers prefer. What you’re saying is ‘I understand your business, I want to help you, and I am capable of helping you’.

It’s not enough for you to say that you are qualified, the customer has to agree that you are, which means you have to write content with them in mind.The more content you have that reinforces this message the better. Remember though, this is all about what interests your customer, not what interests you.

Sales Process 3:  Needs

At some stage you need a conversation to show that you understand and can meet the specific needs of a customer. A good content strategy will ensure that the more general issues are already dealt with; you’ve helped similar organisations with similar issues and already answered several queries through your rich content. The aim of a content marketing strategy is to make customers as sales ready as possible – but avoid consciously trying to sell too early on.

Think of this stage as the preliminary meetings that you usually have. Normally you’re trying to find out what the customer wants to achieve and describing how your products, skills or experience can meet those needs. A good content strategy will cut down the number of those meetings you will need.

Sales Process 4: Closing

Closing a deal is probably not something you will be doing through social media or through your blog. Effective content marketing, however, should reduce the time and effort needed to finalise the sale. Because customers will have greater confidence in your capabilities they should be able to move more quickly to a position where they are able to sign on the dotted line.

Hopefully, thinking about content marketing and social media in terms of the sales process will focus your efforts and direct the content you create. If you want some help with this I would be happy to hear from you – use the ‘Contact’ tab on the left or go to my main website to get in touch

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Beer Helps Bloggers

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Several years ago I had an important email on a dull subject that my team needed to read. I put ‘Free Beer’ in the title line and everyone opened it.  First rule of effective blogging – the eye catching or intriguing headline.

Blogging is all about being noticed, so strong headlines and openings are essential.

Blogging is also about enlightening your audience.  To do this you must be writing about something they are interested in, and do so in an informal and engaging way.  Subjects should be relevant to what you do as a business – but look at them from an angle that is interesting and useful for your target audience, rather than yourself.

Why have a blog?

The point of blogging is to maintain contact with your network; building your reputation as being knowledgeable and helpful, and not necessarily somebody who is trying to sell something every time they hear from you.  But if you write about things that people don’t find helpful, or things which bear no relation to what you do, people will not see the point of it.

Good blog posts tend to be brief and focused.  Don’t try to introduce too many topics into a single post – one is usually plenty.  If you find you are writing a post that is getting long and complicated, think about whether it should be two separate posts.  This will help you with the next point: post frequently.

Effective blogging relies on regularity.  One post per week is much more effective than publishing four together at the end of the month.  Publishing a single post every few weeks is not likely to help you, or your network, very much at all.

How will people find your blog?

OK, so now you’ve written a fantastically entertaining and relevant blog post – how are people going to find it?  However good a blogger you are, people are not going to access your posts unless prompted.  Make full use of your social media channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to alert your network to the fact that you have published something new.

To build effective social media channels you need to… Oh, that’s a subject for another blog post.  A monthly email rounding up your most recent posts with hyper-links to them is an effective way to keep in touch with your network and keep you in their minds.

So for effective blogging remember to be Brief, Engaging, Enlightening and Regular. BEER, see – clever eh.

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