Does blogging help your search results? You bet.
In case you wondered how effective blogging is for search results, it is very effective.
B2B marketing and branding (or business marketing and branding) is our key area of specialisation. Below you see where my blog ranked for some key search terms relating to my business:
Business branding - 3rd out of 55,300,000
B2B marketing - 5th out of 2,960,000
Business marketing - 7th out of 523,000,000
(Searching www.google.com.au, which is what my market are most likely to use)
Great B2B Marketing resource
If you're business is B2B, you should read this blog, "modern b2b marketing" by Jon Miller from Marketo. It's a good mix of practical tips, great links to other resources and strategic thinking on what makes B2B work. Highly recommended.
His link posts are a great B2B resource; a bit of a treasure trove.
Advertising agencies are not the real problem
I like High Mcleod's thoughts on marketing. He's insightful and by all accounts walks the walk as well as talking the talk with regard to leading edge marketing. In his post "advertising 2.0 doesn't exist" he has (among other things) a good crack at ad agencies, their relevancy and their role.
But is the problem really the ad agency? What is the client's role in this? How close am I if I say that the majority of advertising and selling lacks impact because too little time and effort is invested into differentiating products, services and value proposition?
How much do companies invest in understanding their market? Their competitors? Trying to see what their customers see?
Is that the role of an ad agency? I don't think so. Ad agencies in my mind are good at one thing and one thing only; take a brief and communicate an idea in the most effective way. No more, no less.
Here are a few of Hugh's points:
5. Saatchi & Saatchi: "We're not an ad agency, we're an ideas business." Right. Oh well, I'm sure they're trying to get there one day. Maybe they'll succeed. Who knows.
No they are not an ideas business; that's what the client should be. The ad agency should just be good at ideas to communicate the idea.
6. So a lot of clients have been recently asking their ad agencies, "So what can you do for us in Web 2.0?" And the agencies have been replying, "Lots! Lots and lots and lots and lots!" Bullshit. Ad agencies have so far been hopeless in this space. I don't know of ONE SINGLE piece of work coming out of a traditional ad agency in the last five years that has been even halfway original, thought provoking or effective. Captain Morgan's? Beyond lame. Juicy Fruit? Beyond lame on steroids. Glenfiddich? A missed opportunity.
Ask a silly question and you get a silly answer. What's web 2.0? A new magazine? Instead, what if a client asked "So what can you do for us to get our customers to tell us what they think?" That might be useful.
7. Bartle Bogle Hegarty, the very fine London ad agency, used to pitch their clients, "We makes brands famous". Right. Like movie stars. Like celebs. Like the guys getting out of the limos and walking down the red carpet. Like the ones who get all the money and invites to the fancy parties. While the rest of us stand behind the velvet rope out in the cold, looking in with longing. Great. Super. Lucky us.
What's wrong with that pitch? Nothing that I can see. The ad agency is pitching to a marketing manager/director/vp. The marketing manager wants a famous brand, because a famous brand will make her famous. All this demonstrates is that the agency knows their target market.
So ad agencies are not the problem. They're just not as important in the mix as they believe they are. The problem lies with business that try and take short cuts.The problem lies with businesses that won't invest time and money in the fundamentals of their marketing success.
How video can work in B2B marketing – HP
Is there any medium more engaging than video?
Eric Kintz from HP writes about how they are using video in their online B2B marketing program with great success:
Why would you call your company SICK?
Well, you might call your company SICK if you were German and your customers didn't speak English... You might if you didn't think of ever entering international/English speaking markets.
However, these guys have actually built a very significant business in the US and many other overseas countries, so they might argue it makes no difference whether their business is SICK, SLICK or SCHMICK.
When a business is doing well, marketers with ideas about branding (or anyone else who wants to implement change) will struggle to get a hearing. Even more so if the changes proposed are seen to be cosmetic.
Let's face it, the impact is hard to prove upfront. Would SICK be more successful if they used a different brand name in English speaking countries? What do you think?
What podcasting means to marketers
Steve Rubel posted a link to this fantastic online presentation on what podcasting is all about. It seems a bit lazy for me to refer to other blogs like this for my content, but it happens to be something that covers a couple of really current subjects:
- How is the interaction between marketers and their markets changing?
- How can marketers practically use new communications opportunities like podcasting?
This presentation does a good job in explaining both. As a B2B marketer, the format of this presentation in itself is also really interesting. Considering that in B2B virtually all your customers will have a broadband internet connection this type of simple presentation could very easily be done for many businesses.
- How many business owners/ceo's/sales managers struggle to explain their value proposition on paper but are dynamite in person?
- How powerful is it to do a virtual boardroom presentation, using whatever props you like, rather than a flat piece of paper or an html page?
The key will be how well this can be executed at a cost that allows for businesses to have a crack at this. As it is online, measuring the success at least should be relatively easy. It's pretty exciting stuff.
How is technology changing marketing?
- - How we manage our relationships
- - How we communicate with our customers, partners and prospects
- - How we develop new ideas for products and services
- - How our customers look for us
- - How we look for our customers
- - How we monitor our competitors
- - How we monitor customer satisfaction
- - How we source our products
- - How we sell to our customers
- - How we check our pricing strategy
- - How we present our company
- - How we analyse our performance
- What have I missed?
B2B Marketing Series – What’s different?
What is the difference between Consumer (B2C) and Business (B2B) Marketing?
I read this interesting (albeit a bit academic) take on the difference between B2B and B2C on the website of the American Marketing Association. Note the observation about long sales cycles, small number of customers and sales focused on key account management. Because of these characteristics a lot of companies believe that all they need to do is hire a sales person. They are selling themselves short.
Apart from the reliance on individuals (who may come and go) to control your destiny, there are some fantastic opportunities these days that can enhance your marketing performance. And current technology offers a fantastic opportunity. Let's look at two key functions of marketing, communications and customer satisfaction.
Creating longterm relationships - generally relationships exist on a sales and technical level, but not at a corporate level. Creating a relationship at a corporate level has a number of advantages. A significant one is that if your sales person leaves, they don't take the relationship with them. How?
- Start with a corporate customer/prospecting database that can be used effectively to communicate with prospects/customers.
- Conduct at least two small events a year; could be anything from a drink to a full-blown product launch.
- Find out how you can use your website to let your customers communicate with you directly, i.e providing feedback, access to information that is important to them etc.
Creating value - what do you do to deliver value to your customers? Is it a good product and good customer service?
It is easy to end up making decisions based on anecdotal information from feedback from sales people or technical people. Use this as a starting point to explore other opportunities.
- Find out what your competitors do - even a internet based search and some targeted telephone calls to partners and customers are a good start.
- Ask your customers - conduct regular surveys; if you have good relationships you can do this via email and internet at virtually no cost to your organisation
Brand schmand? Does it really matter in B2B?
Our customers almost exclusively deal business to business. The reason we focus on this specific segment is because they tend to have limited in-house marketing resources, so we can fill a gap in a flexible format. As a rule, B2B companies in the SME space have a management team consisting of a CEO/Business owner as well as a Sales, Finance and Operations Manager.
Selling is the key marketing activity. And clearly, selling is the most important marketing function in B2B.
Marketing is generally equated with advertising, which is on the nose (and often for good reasons). Marketing is not seen as a strategic tool, because it is often not understood. The Accenture report I referred to in my last post pointed this out too, but related more to large corporate companies (with Marketing Managers) rather than SME's who have no internal marketing champion.
Take branding. When recently discussing a proposed tagline with a customer they insisted on using a tagline that would explain what they do. I argued that we need to aim for an emotional response, not a factual one. I read an interesting article in MarketingProfs by Kevin Randall, which has an interesting observation:
People say that they are not influenced by advertisements, but data and client spending suggest otherwise. In the early-to-mid 1980s, IBM did
not have the best computer systems or pricing. "Big Blue," however, became the enterprise systems market leader because you never got fired for buying IBM (same with Cisco today). IT Directors "bought" a relationship, company,
reputation, service, people, assurance. In other words, they bought
goodwill or the brand.
I still believe that most marketing services are aimed at either large corporate or FMCG organisations, not business-to-business, not SME. They need a combination of marketing services, rather than point solutions. From help with analysing opportunties to branding, to marketing communications and customer satifaction/loyalty programs.
A great opportunity for progressive B2B companies, a great opportunity for marketing firms.
It may not be a great business tool yet, but…
When you see stats like this every marketer should pay attention:
These figures show the growth of blogging sites, and it's phenomenal. I am interested to see how the local aspect of blogging will take shape, especially from a business perspective. Because let's face it, for a business in Melbourne Australia there is not a lot of value in being wel-known in Seattle unless you actually turn your blog into an advertising site, which I'm not interested in.
The non-local nature of the Internet has always been a key weakness. In Australia the largest telco, (51% Government owned) launched an Australian specific search engine searching the web, the yellow and white pages, etc. Not sure how successful it is, but the concept of being able to use the Internet to specifically communicate locally makes as much sense as it does to communicate globally, depending on what your goals are.
Syndicate
Subscribe to this site's RSS feed.