MarketingSherpa Blog

This week’s B2B newsletter article, “B2B Marketing: 7 mobile and social media tactics,” features three industry experts providing insight into mobile and social media marketing. Although there is some overlap in practices, the complex B2B sale involves some channel techniques that don’t completely apply to consumer marketers.

But, luckily for B2C practitioners, one of the experts, Tim Hayden, Chief Marketing Officer, 44Doors, a mobile marketing solutions provider, had a few ideas for the consumer channel, too.

Here are a few quick-and-dirty ideas to hopefully improve your mobile marketing efforts. Some ideas you may have heard about before, and some might be completely new practices.

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A steady diet of fresh data helps marketing teams invest wisely and reach the right person, with the right offer, at the right time. It’s almost like food for your strategy, giving it strength.

But like food, data needs skilled hands to process it. You cannot pull a potato out of the ground and call it dinner, and you cannot track unique visitors and call it marketing.

You need a data chef, better known as an analyst. This person will help you take the unprocessed fields of grain in your database and turn them into Fettuccini Alfredo. Big companies have been doing this for years.

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There are many valuable social media platforms for marketing: Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ being the most well-known and popular. But, arguably the hottest and most talked about platform right now is Pinterest.

From its website: “Pinterest is an online pinboard. Organize and share things you love.” At least a little bit confusing from a marketer’s standpoint, right?

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I recently had the chance to speak with two self-described Pinterest “power users,” who also happen to be marketers with some ideas on how practitioners should approach the social platform.

Jessica Best, Community Director, emfluence, a digital marketing services company, and Tiffany Monhollon, Senior Manager of Content Marketing, ReachLocal , an online marketing company, provided their insight on Pinterest.

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Multiply your company’s revenue by five.

That’s the sum of what lead nurturing could produce considering that long-term leads — the ones often ignored by salespeople — represent as much as 80% of your sales. (In Chapter 18 of his book, “Lead Generation for the Complex Sale,” Brian Carroll outlines the startling research.)

I know this is an extreme oversimplification, but it does represent the potential that is leaking out of your pipeline.

So now that I have your attention, let’s talk about what you can do about it.

If you want to ensure these future customers remain in your funnel, you must have a relevant,

consistent conversation with them. I am not implying you pick up the phone this minute and start calling them (although that’s a good idea further down the marketing funnel — when you want to be certain Sales won’t toss out that lead you thoughtfully nurtured).

What I mean by “conversation” is engaging them with information — content like articles, newsletters, whitepapers and videos — that they’re eager to read, share and act on.

Make sure they can benefit from what you give them regardless of whether they choose to buy from you.

But, of course, if you utilize lead nurturing correctly, potential customers will choose to move forward with your organization when they’re ready to purchase.

You’ll be the one they know and trust.

You’ll have made their lives easier by helping them make their purchasing decision. You’ll also have avoided the mistake of pushing them too hard, too fast.

I wish I could say that lead nurturing is as easy as simply collecting a few articles that promote your latest products and blasting it out across your email lists. But, like anything else, results begin with smart planning. If you want lead nurturing to work, you have to set the groundwork by completing the following:

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What are we really talking about when we’re discuss cutting-edge marketing topics like mobile, social media and Priority Inbox?

These are just technologies. Zeros and ones dancing around in some magic box in the sky. In this interview with Jim Ducharme, Community Manager, GetResponse, I lay out my argument for where you really should focus your efforts in the year ahead, and it’s not on technology …

Living in the U.S., we often use social media to reach domestic customers. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn were popular here first, and that sticks with us. But as social networking expands worldwide, the size of the audience we could be reaching has multiplied.

Focusing exclusively on the U.S. would ignore 80% of the people on Facebook and Twitter, according to “It’s a Social World,” a report from comScore. On LinkedIn, it would ignore more than 60% of the audience (Note: You’ll need to provide an email address to download the report. It’s worth it.)

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The report is full of mindboggling stats like, “social networking captures nearly 1 out of every 5 minutes spent online worldwide,” and “social networking sites now reach 82% of the world’s online population, representing 1.2 billion users.”

If your company sells anywhere outside the U.S. (or ever hopes to), and you’re marketing through social media, then the report points to a world of opportunity. Social penetration among online audiences is above 90% in 35 of the 43 countries measured.

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What is the most powerful way to improve your search engine optimization?

“Content creation works the best, but takes the most work,” Kaci Bower, Research Analyst, MECLABS, said. Take a look at the data from Kaci’s research in the MarketingSherpa 2012 Search Marketing Benchmark Report – SEO Edition.

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“Content creation stands apart in the cluster of tactics, both for its difficulty and its effectiveness. Good content creates buzz and attracts links,” Kaci said. “For this reason, marketers who commit to the effort required in creating quality content can improve their SEO positions.”

So what makes good and effective content?

This is one of the most common questions I’m asked by marketers. Keep in mind, mine is a skewed sample. If I made plumbing fixtures, I would probably always get asked, “What makes good and effective plumbing fixtures?”

So I was very interested by Kaci’s data that, yes, marketers really do struggle with this. I’ve noticed that, when they become aware of this opportunity, marketers tend to fall in the same common trap — they focus on things, like blog posts or Facebook pages.

Instead, let me suggest you …

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Several weeks ago, my B2B newsletter article — Public Relations: Getting corporate data out of subject matter experts heads and into quarterly trend reports increased media coverage 261% — was a case study featuring Commtouch, an Internet security services company based in Israel.

Commtouch’s marketing team was able to leverage its internal subject matter experts — in this case, data analysts — to create valuable content and grab the attention of traditional media and influential bloggers in its field.

Like many MarketingSherpa interviews, I had more good information than could fit into the article. The source for the article, Rebecca Steinberg Herson, Vice President, Marketing, Commtouch, provided five excellent tactics for getting your content marketing material out into the wild.

Without further ado, here are Rebecca’s very actionable tactics:

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As a culture, we are rarely separated from our mobile phones. We take them to work, grocery stores, restaurants, the gym — you name it. Whenever there’s a timeout at a kid’s soccer game, mom pulls out her phone to decide where to take the kids afterward.

In April 2011, Google found that 89% of smartphone users fiddled with the device throughout the day. Pew Research Center found that 42% of cell-owning adults used their devices to cure boredom, and that figure hit 72% in the 18-to-29 age category.

R.J. Talyor, Senior Director, Mobile Products, ExactTarget, summed up the typical consumer attitude toward mobile phones when he shared the following image last week at MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2012.

“It’s a great metaphor for the consumers we are marketing to these days,” Talyor said. “They have the phones almost embedded in their arms, always with them.”

Rather than assuming what people will be doing at certain times of day and building a mobile marketing campaign around that assumption, Talyor suggests that marketers try targeting “granular moments,” or specific situations the audience encounters.

“How can I take advantage about the location of that individual, and how can I take advantage of what I know about that individual’s market?” Talyor said.

He provided these two examples.

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Last week, we held our Email Summit 2012 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, where more than 750 of your marketing peers joined us for four days of keynotes, workshops, discussion panels, case study sessions and networking.

Brian Solis, Principal, Altimeter, joined us as one of our three keynote speakers for the Summit.  Brian spoke to the audience about integrating social media with your email marketing to engage a new type of connected customers. After his keynote, Brian took a few minutes to chat with GetResponse Community Manager, Jim Ducharme.

In this video interview, Brian talks about two main thoughts:

The connected consumer

• The democratizing of information is creating an empowered and connected consumer
• Technology simply facilitates to bring about change
• Success now comes from listening and learning from consumers

The “Digital Darwinism” concept

• When technology and society evolve faster than your ability to adapt
• Examples of companies fading away because consumer behavior is evolving toward a digital world
• The connected consumer requires you to design the experiences and outcomes they want in the channels they want

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