Lead management expert Carlos Hidalgo discusses how marketing and sales simply agreeing to a definition of a lead isn't a panacea for greater ROMI.& In his words, "Limiting the focus to agreeing to the definition of a lead is like sitting down for a 5-course dinner and only eating the appetizer."

Much more must be taken into account when defining lead management processes, particularly in light of the multi-stage waterfall or funnel.& Carlos poses these questions:

• If marketing and sales develop a singular definition for “lead”, to what stage in the funnel should it be applied?
• Will all leads be sent to sales?& If not, what qualification criteria will be used to identify which ones should and which ones shouldn’t?
• What routing processes should be developed to ensure that leads get to the sales person at the right time?
• How many leads are needed in order to help sales meet their revenue goals?

“As we all know too well, most interactions and communication is done online using a wide variety of social networks. What may not be taken into consideration is the role ethics plays with online sharing and communication, or that there needs to be a place for ethics in social media.” As online sharing and communication becomes increasingly popular, it is important to step back and set as well as review some online communication ethics, just as we have ethics for face-to-face and telephone conversations. This post discusses why ethical principles need to be applied to social media and what should be included in a social media policy, to ensure positive results for your business. “Social media should be a part of a business and business should not entirely be social media. Communicating online is different from communicating in person or printed messages. Be aware of all the different aspects of social media – who sees your message, who is sharing messages and what are they sharing. Take responsibility for any online behaviors – positive and negative – and understand the logic behind having an online presence.”&

Google has released its latest tool that will be powerful for any computer user looking to share files and collaborate on projects in a simple, efficient manner. From a post on Mashable , &“Google Drive, Google’s 5GB cloud-storage service, is official. Announced on the company blog Tuesday, the service will integrate with Google Docs and will allow you to access files from anywhere and collaborate on documents with colleagues. Google Docs is built right into Google Drive, which means you can work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Once you’ve shared content with someone else, you can add and reply to comments on anything (PDF, image, video file, etc.) and you’ll receive notifications when other people comment the items you’ve shared.” This new tool even allows for “smart tagging,” So if you’ve uploaded a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge to your drive, the next time you perform a search for the bridge, your photo will show up along with other results. This is just the latest in a series of Google improvements; this could prove valuable for marketers or anybody with a need for collaboration on a project or needs the ability to easily share files of any kind.&

Frames are an integral part of your B2B messaging. In order to be most effective, you should frame your message to fit within the existing frames of your target audience. &

It’s so easy when you’re designing a website or crafting a marketing campaign:

This post discusses the four questions every email capture page must answer, as well as additional best practices for designing the registration page.& The questions include:

• What will I get from you?
• When will I get it?
• Why should I sign up?
• Privacy – how will you handle the data I give you?

A prospective B2B client& is considering a name change for their business. There are many factors to consider and I was asked by the CMO to share any immediate ideas I had on the subject.

Trendspotting is the mother's milk of digital marketing punditry. If I had a dime for every "top 10 tech trends of [insert year]" article I've ever read, well, I'd just have a large pile of dimes, and if I had a dime for every one I've written, I'd have at least 30 cents.

Social media and Twitter specifically, is very consumer driven and targeted. It can be difficult to establish a strong and effective following in the B2B sector. This post on the MarketingProfs website offers some Twitter tips for B2B marketers to make posts and profiles more impactful. The first tip offered is to “Note when your audience is most engaged by tracking clicks and retweets.” Some other tips mentioned include “Use industry keywords in your Twitter bio,” “Tweet offers and links to your landing pages to generate leads,” “Test and track different types of tweets by linking to company blog posts,” and more. Having industry specific keywords can be very beneficial for a profile, as often times, people will search keywords in the Twitter search bar to see relevant results. Having accurate clearly identified keywords is the first step for gathering a powerful Twitter following.&

What are best-in-class B2B companies doing to drive greater engagement and ROI from their email marketing efforts? This article outlines some of the approaches SiriusDecisions sees leading companies utilizing to improve response rates, including:

• Leveraging a multi-channel approach
• Using email to drive social engagement
• Designing for mobile
• Utilizing trigger-based email
• Evolving email nurture approaches

&

Today’s inbound marketing can deliver measurable, reliable information about the success of your initiatives.

Our friends at Inside View created this awesome infographic that gathers together many statistics, ideas and examples about using social media to help drive leads and sales for B2B companies. You can look through the stats yourself, but here are some to consider:

Andy Jankowski posted an article How Not to Fail at Enterprise Social Media on SocialMediaToday which focuses on large corporations using social media networks within the work culture. He analyzes some benefits and downfalls that could be brought to the forefront when social media tools are implemented within enterprises.

The majority of this post focuses on the positives social media can bring to a company if the research and time is spent deciding what tools to implement, making sure employees will properly use the networks. “Enterprise social media can be valuable to every level of your company. When strategies are successful, they can grow employee engagement, tear down knowledge silos inhibiting the sharing the information and help your company recruit and support top talent. Enterprise social media can give rise to serendipity where subject matter experts and information are easily found within your organization, making your employees smarter and more productive.”

The downside of a poorly implemented social media strategy is also discussed, discussing how hazardous it may be if the research is not put forth. So, when your company is deciding whether or not to implement a social network, make sure the time is put in regarding research, making sure the proper tool is chosen to avoid distraction and frustration among employees.

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A lot of CEOs tell me their B2B companies just don't need social media. Here's why they are dead wrong.

At this year’s SXSW, one of the strongest B2B social media sessions was the panel “Social Media in the Underground World of B2B.” The panel provided eye-opening insight and touched on some unexpected topics, making it an invaluable learning session for B2B marketers.

The presenters included Duane Schulz from Xerox Corporation (@duaneschulz), Jeanette Gibson from Cisco Systems (@JeanetteG), Shanee Ben-Zur from NVIDIA (@sbenzur), Susan Emerick (@sfemerick) from IBM and Melissa Chanslor from Text 100 (@Chanslor).

The panel opened by covering social strategy and engagement. The panelists agreed that the best place to start B2B social media marketing is where your audience is. Identify areas where key decision makers spend their time. Shape your engagement strategy around where those prospects are. Use listening tools, participate in the conversation, and measure effectiveness.

Read more:&http://socialmediab2b.com/2012/03/b2b-social-media-sxsw-panel-ideas/#ixzz1pgjV8eIm

We wrote a book about B2B social media to share our ideas with others and to help them learn how to adopt social media in their B2B companies. One sign of success is when people take the ideas and make them their own. This is something that the web has always been good for. People gather ideas, remix them and create their own content from them. We were pretty excited to see the book review from Aarne Tllinen, Project Manager at University of Jyvskyl. And thankfully it is written in English...

This post &on PR Daily &presents the reader with “The no-fail guide to writing popular blog posts.” The author of this post is Neil Patel, a successful blogger who has propelled one of his own websites into the Technorati Top 100 list. He walks the reader through some helpful tips to gain maximum exposure and get the most out of a post. Some of these tips include “Use simple words,” “Use the word you,” “Write how-to posts,” “Write detailed posts,” “Hook your readers,” “Create a conversation,” and more. He says of using simple words, “The first thing you probably notice when you read popular blog posts is that they're really easy to understand, no matter what the content. They are easy to read because the writer wrote with simple words.I always write my posts with a fifth grade vocabulary rather than that of a highly educated person. I'd rather you be able to read and understand what I write than appear like an educated person who just confuses people. The interesting thing is even with a fifth grade vocabulary, you will look like an expert.Also, people are more likely to share a post they think other people will understand. So use simple words, not fancy ones.” Read into the post to see more of his tips, how do you promote your blogs? Do you use any of these tactics?&

Not all Social Networks are Equal.

When it comes down to sheer popularity Facebook is the social network that wins.

Facebook is also about “Identity” whether that is a personal profile or a “business brand” persona.

Twitter is about “Events” which could be the next plane crashing into the Hudson river or letting your audience know that your latest blog post is published…that is an event!

Google plus is “Core” and is woven into the science of search as Google embeds it into every one of its web properties from Picasa to YouTube.

It cannot and should not be ignored by marketers as social signals are now being measured and monitored by Google machines and is being woven into the DNA of search. Optimizing your online assets (blog and website) for search engines is vital.

Different social networks will be need to be included in your social media marketing strategy depending on your goals, audience and tactics.

Don’t Ignore LinkedIn

If you want to communicate to a B2B audience and business professionals then LinkedIn with its 150 million members is a good place to play.

If you want to engage with the business leaders and executives then it is the first channel to turn to.

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re also in B2B marketing. You have things to sell, and limited time and resources to create social media content that is both human and helpful.

But many marketers — in an effort to expand their reach and influence to a mass audience — make the mistake of over-automating their social media, robotically blasting out promotional spam without building any customer relationships or listening to their marketplace.

Until recently, I was possibly the least automated B2B marketing professional onTwitter. Over the past few years I’ve tried various apps to better organize my social media efforts, but most of the time it’s just me manually tweeting and learning from those I follow.

One of the biggest challenges B2B marketers face when they develop a blog is maintaining its momentum. You may write a few posts, run out of ideas and let your blog sit empty as you devote your time to other projects. However, to realize benefits from a corporate blog, you must post engaging content on a regular basis.

1. Share your&latest research&or white papers.

2. Post educational information or&“how to” tips.

3.&Discuss a problem&in your industry.

4. Tell readers about your&upcoming events.

5. Comment on the latest&news in your sector.

6. Reformat your&press releases&into blog posts to highlight your company’s latest news.

7.&Profile a staff member. Share stories about their work and why they are involved with your company.

8.&Interview your CEO&or&another&leader&or&colleague&in your industry about a&hot topic.

9. Post&case studies&that show the value of your services.

10.&Accept&guest posts&from your staff, customers or leaders in your industry.

11. Post&photos&and write short captions under them.

12. Share&“how to” videos. You can also post videos of interviews, keynote speeches, product demos, events and staff shenanigans.

13.&Report about an event or conference&you have attended. You can even blog live from the event.

14.&Review something&(e.g.&a book, program or event).

15. Develop a&resource list. If customers regularly ask you for information on a specific topic, give them a list of online resources.

16.&Link to a post on another blog&and tell your readers why they should check it out.

17. If you’re active on Twitter, you can share your&weekly “top tweets.”&That way, readers who don’t use Twitter can keep up with your latest news, and readers who tweet will want to follow you.

18. Mention&your other social networks. For example, you can highlight discussions you’re having on Facebook and encourage readers to join the conversation.

What about you?&What other topics make good B2B blog content? Feel free to share your thoughts below.

This post &on Mashable by David Berkowitz discusses tips to avoid making mistakes when taking your marketing campaign to Twitter. Berokwitz writes about “hashtag marketing” campaigns becoming high jacked thrusting them towards irrelevance. &His first tip is to figure out why you might be using a hashtag in the first place. He says, “Brands tend to use hashtags, predominantly on Twitter and sometimes other services like Instagram, either to create a centralized discussion around their campaign or event, or to jump into conversations that are already happening. Assess what you want to get out of the hashtag before diving in.” The post goes on to speak about other tips for hashtag marketing including determining what kind of hashtag makes sense for your goals, thinking of the worst-case highjacking situation, and more. Berkowitz points out the future of marketing campaigns will certainly incorporate hashtags, so learning from other brands hashtag campaigns is important for campaign success.

Let’s keep the conversation moving forward! What hashtag campaigns have you seen succeed on Twitter or Instagram?&

Infographics that feature B2B social media stats always get my attention. And when someone takes the time to fully source their statistics with footnotes that point each stat to a source, I am going to shout their praises from the rooftops. The following infographic does both as it focuses its gaze on content marketing.

Social media works best for B2B companies when people connect directly around topics they are passionate about. Connections work even better when no one in the group is pushing a particular agenda. This allows the focus of the communications to be around joint learning, which draws crowds, versus thinly disguised sales pitches, which drives everyone toward the metaphorical door. There is no group better to foster these learning discussions than a company’s channel partners, especially for those companies lucky enough to have built out strong channel partner programs. Channel partners know the niche and know the clients. They also have an independence that provides both authority and authenticity. These partners looked at all the solutions they could sell, and with their reputation on the line, chose to include your offering. When they enter a discussion, and a prospect checks out the channel partner’s background, the fact that they didn’t create a particular product makes it easier for them to be established as providers of valued advice.

Landing page creation, optimization and analytics best practices.

In this post on Contentmarketinginstitute, Barry Feldman offers his essential playbook to winning the content marketing Superbowl. Feldman writes, “We’ll call it the Super Content Marketing Bowl, where scoring points means expanding your audience and establishing authority in the things you do best. Before we play ball, we’ll meet at the 50-yard line and introduce some new rules for taking home the content marketing trophy.”

The top three points stated include, “You need a great site to compete,” “Go for the goal” and “Score points.” He says of scoring points, “Promote your blog relentlessly by using the social media tools available to you, creating links where you can, and joining relevant conversations on other blogs. Write guest posts for other blogs, and syndicate your content by finding relevant outlets for publication. Forge relationships with strategic allies,” and more.

Let’s keep the conversation moving forward! With the big game around the corner, do you find this playbook the key to content marketing success? What are your favorite points?

As a B2B marketing agency, we encourage our clients to work on their website content before diving in too aggressively in social media.

Pinterest has made a big splash on the social media scene, by quickly earning passionate users who log multiple hours per day on the site. Pinterest saw a 4,000% increase in site traffic from June to December of last year, and many consumer-facing and female-centric brands are already using it well. While Nordstrom pins its latest shoes and fashions by boards organized by department, Whole Foods uses the site to pin kitchen design inspiration and recycling projects in addition to recipes using its foods.

But despite its reputation as a service for brides and decorators, only 58% of the visitors to the site are women. And just like its diversity in users, brands on Pinterest aren’t limited to department and grocery stores. News sites such as Mashable and Time Magazine are also using the site to spread cover art, articles and copy included in its news stories.

Email subject lines are a form of headline. They attract attention and get your email content a chance to be read, so write them well.

With the holiday season winding down and 2012 just around the corner, it's time to take a deep breath and get ready to plunge into the new year. When marke

2012 is going to be a big year for adoption of social media for B2B companies. We expect that early adopter companies will move even further out in front by becoming social in many areas of their business, while more of the second wave adopters will begin to see value in social media and move forward with planning and execution. This means that there will be a greater spread of B2B social media activities than ever before. More resources are available for B2B marketers, as well as more experienced practitioners, both of which will make the previously steep learning curve more manageable.

The following predictions for 2012 reveal many of the ways B2B companies will leverage social media for their business success.

Read more:&http://socialmediab2b.com/2011/12/b2b-social-media-predictions-for-2012/#ixzz1h59KmjYS

The importance of sending relevant email messages is frequently discussed by email marketers at conferences, webinars and on blogs. However, how many organizations achieve this objective? To answer this question, MarketingSherpa surveyed more than 2,700 marketers and asked how their organizations were sending email communications based on four key areas: relevant content, sending time, segmentation of subscribers, and the clarity of the conversion goal in the email.

1. Add Social Profile Names

Let’s start with the most obvious one and make sure you add your social profiles to your direct mail piece. Don’t just add a Facebook or Twitter logo, but include your company profile name. Don’t make your customers and prospects search for you online.

2. Add a Social Component
Rather than just letting customers and prospects know about your social profiles, make the offer itself social. If your offer includes a discount, add an additional discount for sharing the offer on social networks. Or include a supporting ebook with your offer that includes a registration on your Facebook page.

3. Create Shareable Landing Pages
When a customer or prospect receives your offer, they are directed to a landing page to redeem the offer. The best landing pages are those that have only one action for the visitor to do, usually filling out a lead form. After they submit the form, return a thank you page with share buttons on it. This will allow them to share the offer with their colleagues and social networks.

4. Post on Social Profiles
Support the direct mail by posting it on your social channels. It is easy to share emails on your company social media profiles, but it takes a little more effort to post your direct mail pieces. Take that extra effort and make sure you add&campaign codes&to your URLs to track which sites drive traffic to your landing pages. This will help you focus your social efforts for the next mailing.

What are some other ways that you have expanded the effectiveness of your direct mail campaigns using social media?

Landing page creation, optimization and analytics best practices

1. Know where you want to go. Set specific, aggressive (but reachable) objectives for awareness, inbound inquiries and qualified leads. My recent article titled Just how many sales leads do you need? can help you calculate your 2012 sales lead requirements.

2. Know your current Marketing costs and return on investment by campaign. Using the old management adage, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure”.

3. Have a plan for shifting some of your marketing efforts and spending from higher-cost push marketing to lower-cost pull marketing methods.

4. Resolve to drop three ineffective media/programs and replace them with three new media/programs that have good potential.

5. Tie your 2012 marketing initiatives to revenue. Make sure the plan you put together has a clear connection to revenue attainment. Marketers who tie their activities to revenue have much greater job security.

6. Have a plan for what you will learn in 2012, hopefully something that will make you more valuable to the organization.

The changing nature of our industry propels us to stay on top of the latest trends. Meeting and learning from other professionals helps us do our jobs better. Here's what's on tap for marketing industry events for December.

B2B buyers are increasingly turning to online marketing content to help them research purchasing decisions before they reach out to interact with B2B sellers. B2B marketers must understand that the content they create has to create value in order to win over B2B buyers. So how can marketers get more value out of their content marketing? Here are four ways:

1. Add social sharing buttons When asked if “Share This” buttons had any impact on their perception of B2B content, 77 percent of B2B buyers said that adding social sharing buttons made the collateral either “much more influential” or “somewhat more influential” than collateral that didn’t include these buttons.

2. Embed audio and video B2B buyers find that collateral which includes embedded audio and video contributes to the perceived influence of the content. 83% say that when audio is embedded in content it positively or very positively effects the overall influence, and 92% say the same for video. Buyers also respond better to audio and video content. 55% of buyers say they’ve consumed content with audio or video, up 10% from the year before.

3. Make it mobile friendly Although the vast majority of B2B marketing collateral is viewed on the desktop, more than 1/3rd of buyers are using their mobile devices to research B2B purchases. 37% of tech buyers report that they have consumed B2B content using a mobile device. 33% reported viewing content using a smartphone and 16% via tablet.

4. Highlight it on your web site Corporate web sites are the most frequently used channel for obtaining marketing content. 100 percent of the survey respondents indicated they had read company Web content in the past six months to evaluate a technology purchase.

The corporate Web site remains the primary location for your prospective customers to access collateral, so make sure you highlight your whitepapers, webinars, podcasts, e-books and other content so visitors can easily find and consume it.

Also make sure you link to your web-based marketing collateral in all your channels, as many find your content via email newsletters (46%) and social media (19%).

With content marketing playing such a huge role in the B2B marketing sales cycle, providing useful, relevant content that addresses buyers issues and helps solve their challenges will demonstrate that you have the ability to lead them towards success.

I recently read that the success of a campaign is based on the target audience’s belief that the issue is important enough to consider, and that the person who is delivering the message is entitled to be doing so. I often write about the many variables involved in how someone develops their beliefs about what is important (such as social perception, personal factors, etc.), but this idea of entitlement interested me, and I wanted to delve a little deeper into the B2B side of it.

Are you entitled?
Often, B2B companies will market their product by talking about their Unique Selling Propositions — what makes them better than the competition. And that is important, but why are you entitled to be there? Why are you entitled to relay this knowledge, and for your target audience to be motivated enough to purchase your product or buy into your service?

6 Ways That Facebook is Better Than LinkedIn

1. Facebook has created a development platform that makes it easier to create custom web pages. It’s really hard to do the same thing, with the same ease, with the same nicely designed results on LinkedIn.

2. All those business people are already on Facebook. They may not have joined with business in mind, but they are there. The majority of the 800+ million are involved in business.

3. You can find them. Just like on LinkedIn, you can customize your search to find the people you want to reach.

4. You can find their friends too. Facebook is much more effective than LinkedIn at exponential reach through friends of friends, and it is likely that your business audience is connected with their professional peers on Facebook.

5. You can protect them, if you need to. You can create closed, invitation only communities and protect the information about individuals within that community. We’ve done that for very security-sensitive executive users (CIOs and CTOs)!

6. People spend more time on Facebook. It turns out that this last point is a big deal when comparing Facebook to LinkedIn. People log onto LinkedIn for a few key reasons:

   • To update their resume
   • To post a job
   • To look for a job
   • To make a connection, often associated with posting or looking for a job

People go onto Facebook for many, many other reasons, and as a result, they go onto Facebook a lot more often, and spend a lot more time on it. Businesses that take advantage of business people who are spending time on Facebook will engage with those business users.

Read more: http://socialmediab2b.com/2011/11/6-ways-that-facebook-is-better-than-linkedin-for-b2b-marketing/#ixzz1dFSc5Rti

Social Marketing Science: Timing Maximizes Engagement On Twitter And Facebook

Although many companies and brands have already taken LinkedIn into their marketing campaigns, many are not implementing the best practices for their Linkedin Campaigns. The article talks about the best practices of LinkedIn marketing that you would not want to miss when implementing LinkedIn campaigns.

The sections you should not miss when doing LinkedIn marketing include:

• The Company Name
• Assign Admins
• Upload Company Logo
• Describe the Company
• List the Company’s Specialties
• Add the CompanyTwitter and Blog RSS Feeds
• Add the News Module
• Show the Company Type, Size, Website Link
• Select Industry, Operating Status, Year Founded
• Highlight Locations
• Place a Careers Listing
• Promote Your Products or Services
• Monitor Traffic and Audience Analytics on LinkedIn
• Invite Connections to Follow Your Company on LinkedIn

LinkedIn makes it easy to market your B2B company to the millions of member professionals in your target audience. Keep your page updated to ensure that followers can see the individuals behind the brand and how your products or services can solve another company’s real problems. Last but not least,do not forget to complete the listed sections when marketing on LinkedIn!

When Toyota subsidiary Denso Wave developed quick response codes in 1994, few realized how powerful a marketing tool they could be. In the last two years QR codes have taken on a life of their own, with B2C marketing usage taking off thanks to smartphones. QR codes have proven to effectively link the offline world to the online universe. But is there a place for these treasure troves of information in B2B marketing? You bet!

Here are some actionable B2B ideas on how to use QR codes to attract prospects to your business:

An interesting look at some marketing initiatives by companies like American Express, Dell, and Cisco that don't necessarily have clear ROI at the onset. According to the writer Paul Gill, "These companies set audacious goals in the belief that market-changing ideas are more likely to come from the back of an envelope than the bottom line of a spreadsheet. But they also measure like crazy at the back end."

The changing nature of b2b marketing propels us to stay on top of the latest trends. Here's what's on tap for marketing industry events in November!

A good analysis on the relationship between form length and leads captured. Marketing experts like David Meerman Scott advocate "making content like white papers totally free without registration in order to spread the information as far as possible." For those that must produce leads, however, this post offers a compelling stat: testing has shown that each additional piece of data required on a web landing page/lead capture form will depress the response rate by 10-20 percent.

Any B2B marketer who has initiated an email or direct mail campaign lately knows that business marketing data degrades quickly. Bounce rates are hitting the ceiling. Direct mail return rates are shockingly wasteful. Data master Dun Bradstreet says the current level of data quality costs U.S. business $600 billion per year in printing, mailing costs and staff overhead alone.

Blame this instability on the volatility of today’s businesses. DB says:

A new business opens every minute. A business closes every three minutes A CEO changes every minute. A company name change occurs every two minutes. Overall business data is said to breakdown at a rate of 3% to 6% a month. That’s one-third to three-quarters of obsolete data per year. Bad data is an enormous liability that can lead to:

Got a great email marketing solution? Got a solid opt-in and scrubbed contact list? That’s half the battle to a great return on your email marketing investment. Here are six simple tips you can use to improve almost any email marketing effort. 1. Remember why it’s called a “message”. If you think of your email campaign as an ongoing dialogue with each prospect, it will change your strategy. For instance, in a dialogue, you have to keep the conversation going – and that means listening to the people you’re talking about. (How are they responding? What actions are they taking?) It also means staying relevant. (If they visited your blog after your last email, but have never been to the products page after several messages, stop sending them messages that try to drive them to the products page – offer them an incentive to take some other action instead.)

B2B marketers focus on social media as a way to connect online with prospects and customers, but social media offers a huge opportunity to enhance offline events like tradeshows and conferences. Trade shows still make up a large percentage of B2B companies’ marketing budgets, so the following ideas can help leverage those events and make them more successful. And more social.

1. Use Full URLs for Social Media Profiles Every booth sign, business card and flyer includes logos for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Don’t make your prospects and customer search to find you on these platforms. Provide the full URL for your page. If you still have a long and unwieldy Facebook URL, go to facebook.com/username to select a custom URL.

2. Encourage Facebook Likes Via Text Message Even though smartphones continue to grow, many customers and prospects who come to your booth may still use feature phones. Show them how they can set up their phones to use Facebook via text messages and how they can easily subscribe to your Facebook Page that way. Just text “like” and the Page’s username to 32665 or your specific country code. This way, booth visitors can like your page while they are standing in front of you and continue to get updates on whatever device they use for Facebook, including their computer.

3. Provide Latest Topics from Relevant Industry Groups Prior to the trade show, review topics and industry issues that are being discussed in LinkedIn Groups, or other online industry gathering places. Provide these topics, along with talking points, to your sales reps and other booth personnel as conversation starters. Yes, prospects come to your booth to learn about your products and services, but relevant, industry conversations can help build a relationship.

4. Post Content on Slideshare Slideshare is not just for public presentations, although you should definitely upload any slide decks that are associated with talks you or other company representatives give. Create a short, highly visual deck about new product launches, booth highlights or even an industry news update. Share this deck on your social media profiles for those attending the show, and even for those who can’t make it. A keyword-rich description will also help this information get found on Slideshare.

B2B marketers have long known that to succeed with social media they can’t view it as a stand alone campaign or tactic, but must integrate social media into their marketing plans. Here are four suggestions for doing just that. 1. A Social WebsiteA B2B website is the most likely destination for your prospects and customers with any campaign. A call-to-action from any source drives a visitor to your website for more information, to download a white paper or ebook, or even to contact a sales rep. The first thing you need to make sure is that your website supports the marketing campaign. Whether you have a landing page for the specific offer, or just a clear path from the home page (which is where people will wind up from anything that is not a click), make sure they can find what they are looking for. Making your website social includes providing other remarkable content, usually on a blog, allowing visitors to share and spread your content, and links to your social profiles, along with what visitors can expect when they follow or like your company.

1. Support Traditional Advertising There are stil B2B companies using traditional advertising to drive leads into their funnel. If that is still working for your company, and your cost per lead is competitive to other tactics, it is not yet time to discontinue it cold turkey. It is time to review its effectiveness and cost, as you begin adding social media to your marketing mix. You do, however, want to support that advertising with social media. Create a blog post that provides more in-depth information to what was in the ad. If creating the ad featured an interesting photo shoot, post some behinds the scenes shots on your Facebook page. Shoot a video with the product manager talking about the development of the product and some of the customer feedback that was incorporated into the development.

Read more: http://socialmediab2b.com/2011/10/b2b-social-media-marketing-plans-integrate/#ixzz1b8rtQ9kc

by Claudia Bruemmer

Business-to-business marketing is growing at a rapid pace, but B2B marketers have many challenges to face. What are these challenges? The answer comes from the Marketing Sherpa 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, which surveyed B2B marketers about marketing barriers and top challenges to success. Facing these challenges in today’s market makes it more important than ever for wholesalers and manufacturers to identify these obstacles within their own organizations and develop solutions that will keep them competitive.

The Marketing Sherpa report identified the barriers listed below as obstacles preventing B2B marketers from overcoming their greatest challenges. B2B marketers must identify and address these barriers within their businesses, and then develop solutions in order to succeed. Following are the top barriers identified by the survey.

B2B marketers are always facing challenges in their marketing efforts, but in today’s competitive landscape and tough economic climate those challenges are more pronounced than ever before. In a recent Marketing Sherpa 2012 B2B Marketing Benchmark Report, B2B marketers were asked to identify their top challenges in their marketing efforts.

The most identified challenge for B2B marketers is the “lack of resources in staffing, budgeting or time.” It was 23% higher than the second biggest challenge, “lack of ability to stop executing and think strategically.”

Read more: http://socialmediab2b.com/2011/10/b2b-marketers-challenge-lack-of-resources/#ixzz1aUqWPQ8V