This is not another “How to” article for creating newsletters. Rather, this is a “What to” article, with 35 B2B eNewsletter content ideas to help you think about “what” to write about. There are in fact, a number of excellent resources with “How to” tips for creating, producing, publishing, and managing newsletters—including our own B2B Email Marketing Best Practices eBook. This list on the other hand, is intended to poke you, prod you, make you think and give you ideas about where to look to generate stories that make relevant, meaningful, engaging, and entertaining content for B2B email marketing. Of course, the ideas are also great for business blogging as well. Have more ideas? Please use the comments to add to the list. (more…)
Your B2B email marketing should be much more than putting together the email and pressing send. Given that most B2B email marketing newsletter content continues on your site, there are some important things that you should remember to maximize the online visibility of your newsletter. In doing so, you help ensure your content marketing gets found by many more people than just those in your email marketing databases.
Remember SEO
Most email marketing newsletters carry abstracts or snippets of the stories. Readers then click through to a website to continue reading. If you’ve got good email marketing content you’re going to post on a public part of your site—content for which you’d like to get found via organic search—optimize your content for the search engines. Make sure your email copywriters understand SEO. All the best practices for website SEO apply here—keyword-rich content, title tags, alt tags, headings, meta descriptions, URLs, etc. (more…)
Thanks to everyone for all the great comments and suggested additions re the Big List of B2B Marketing and Sales Blogs.
We continue to find more. This month we’ve got eight more great blogs to add. Make sure to check them out.
Congratulations to all the new additions! (more…)
Our new eBook:
Features more than 130 best practices, strategies, and tips for B2B email marketing
Focuses on the most popular type of B2B email marketing—content marketing, such as email newsletters
Goes beyond the email itself, discussing how to integrate and leverage social media, web analytics, and search engine optimization
Covers general email marketing issues, as well as those specific to B2B marketing
Hot off the press, our new, 58-page eBook is a comprehensive guide to improving your B2B email marketing practices. We put this book together to help our clients and friends improve the results of email marketing to other businesses. (more…)
With all the micro-blogging, I’ve often wondered whether the number of bloggers who actually create original, substantial content is decreasing. Don’t get me wrong, you can create meaningful thought in 140 characters, but it’s a lot easier to write 140 characters (no matter how well crafted) than it is to consistently create original content for a blog. And that ease may have driven many to abandon blogging or not even consider blogging when there is a relatively easy way to start “blogging” on Twitter.
It’s been more than two years since anyone had tried to pull together a list of B2B marketing and sales blogs. Jon Miller of Marketo did it in early 2007. When we reviewed that list, we found a lot of those blogs were no longer active.
So we went searching…
And we found some really great B2B blogs. More than 200 of them. Hats off to all who made the list! Thanks for your continuing contribution. (more…)
In short, no.
Growing your existing business with a particular customer or client may very well be about cultivating the relationship, but getting customers in the first place is not. While relationships with referral sources can lead to referrals, relationships with prospects will often only create a sale if everything else is equal.
Consider the following scenario. A prospect you would really like to land is doing business with another company like yours. Common wisdom suggests the first thing to do is establish a relationship with the prospect. Let him get to know your company. Get some face time. Build some trust. Then, you’ll get an opportunity to quote or present a proposal.
So you send him something. You have a telephone conversation. Engage in social media activities. Get a meeting. Have lunch. Take him golfing.
Then, after several months, you get the opportunity to make a presentation. The presentation goes well, and you feel you have established a rapport with the prospect. Afterwards, you keep in contact with the prospect, periodically calling him or sending him things to show you’re thinking of him and his business.
Finally, after about six or eight months, the prospect gives you the chance to quote on something.
This is your big chance! If you do well here, you not only have a shot at getting this sale, but also the rest of his business. You and your team spend countless hours responding to the RFQ or RFP. You check the specifications. You identify areas where you can save them money. You carefully craft responses to their questions. Several internal meetings are devoted to establishing the right pricing and estimates. Then you send it off, go have a beer with your tired team, and hope.
Later you learn that you didn’t get the job. The prospect is cordial. He sincerely thanks you for your time and says you did fine, but they chose to go with their existing provider. You ask some questions to help you understand why they chose not to go with you. The prospect gives you some feedback and assures you you’ll get another chance.
A few months pass and, sure enough, there’s another opportunity. Using what you learned, you go through the same process again. This time, however, you sharpen your pencil a bit more. You say, “Let’s just get the job. Once they work with us, they’ll see how we’re different, and we’ll do lots more work with them.”
Finally after a few more proposals, you get the good news. You got the job! Quick. Marshall the resources. Put the team together. Make sure we do a great job—and make sure we over serve them so there’s no way they’ll go back to their old provider.
The job goes well, great even—from your perspective. And sure enough, you get the opportunity to propose on the next opportunity—along with a host of competitors.
What Happened???
What happened is simply all too common. (more…)
As competition heats up and sales start to stagnate, companies often seek to breathe new life into the brand through rebranding. In all too many cases, however, those expensive rebranding efforts fail to yield the desired business results. Here are some of the key reasons why rebranding often fails. More than executional mistakes that blunt the effectiveness of rebranding efforts, these are critical errors that almost always lead to failure.
Lack of True Change
Sure, sometimes rebranding is done solely to sharpen the image of a company or brand; periodically things need to be freshened up. However, unless you operate in the world of packaged goods, don’t expect great things from launching some new designs and fresh copy.
Rebranding signals change. A new image will cause people to take a fresh look at you—and people’s primary motivation in taking a new look is to see what’s changed. If you’re the same old place dressed up in new wrapping and ribbons, you’ll merely confirm the existing position you own in their minds. You’ll have wasted a valuable opportunity to change their perceptions. There are only so many times your prospects are going to reconsider you. Use them wisely.
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I know at first that may sound strange. What does email marketing have to do with search engine optimization? Fact is, the most prevalent type of B2B email marketing is content marketing, most often in the form of an email newsletter containing several articles. Most email newsletters carry abstracts or snippets of the stories. Readers then click through to a website to continue reading—and that’s the crux of the matter.
I get a fairly large number of content marketing emails each week. I’m surprised how many of them come from companies who do a pretty good job of SEO on their sites, but don’t apply the same practices to the email marketing content hosted on their site.
It’s probably the result of organizational silos—those who create email marketing, those charged with content creation, those responsible for maintaining the site, and those responsible for SEO aren’t working effectively together to leverage each other’s contributions.
If you’ve got good email marketing content you’re going to post on a public part of your site—content for which you’d like to get found via organic search—here are some things to keep in mind. (more…)
Michael Stelzner of White Paper Source recently released a study on how marketers are using social media to grow and promote their businesses. Nearly 900 marketers were surveyed.
One of the great questions in the study was an open ended question that simply asked, “What question about marketing with social media do you most want answered?” The question only allowed one answer and was designed to reveal the most pressing concern people had on their minds regarding social media. The 685 responses were then clustered into groups and ranked. The responses likely mirror some of you own questions regarding social media and reflect people wresting with selecting the right tactics, measuring the effectiveness of this new media, and how to effectively use it.
The remainder of the report attempts to answer some of those questions by presenting other findings from the survey. While the report is not specifically focused on B2B marketing, it’s filled with great information of significant relevance to B2B marketers. Here’s just a few of the findings in the report: (more…)
On Tuesday, Google announced two significant changes.
First, is the deployment of technology aimed at better understanding associations and concepts related to a searcher’s query. One of the applications of the technology is the ability for Google to more frequently present recommended related searches, or refinements. Links to these related searches will generally be displayed at the bottom of the search results page, although you may also start to see them appear at or near the top of the search results. An example of such refinements is shown below.
Google noted that these refinements are now available in 37 languages, and that refinements are no being returned for some long query strings as well.
The second change announced by Google is longer snippets. The snippet is the string of text presented directly under each search result. To date, Google has displayed a maximum of approximately 150 characters in the snippet. For longer queries, Google will now sometimes display expanded snippets. (more…)
In their 1981 marketing strategy classic (it must be a classic, there’s even a 20th Anniversary Edition!), Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Al Ries and Jack Trout noted that if a brand occupies the category leadership position on the “ladder of consideration” of a customer, that position was essentially unassailable. The “high ground”, if you will. Their caveat, of course, was that the positioned leader could conceivably make a mistake significant enough to cause their displacement from atop that ladder…or that a competitor could “bring in a new ladder” with new discriminating variables favoring the competitor and more important to the consumer. Otherwise the category leader could remain on top indefinitely. With no variance in B2C vs. B2B. (more…)
Articles and blog postings on B2B search marketing are often hard to find. At Search Engine Land, we’re fortunate to have a stable of experts who regularly contribute great content and make the Strictly Business column a success. But during the year, I’ve found a lot of other great content, too. I chose 30 of my favorite B2B search and internet marketing posts from 2009. To that I added three of my own articles that were especially popular or helpful to people. I know I’ve missed some great content. If you know of others, please add them via comments. Continue reading post at Search Engine Land.
We who’ve been in the marketing communications business for years have certainly been exposed to a myriad of brand repositionings in our professional careers…and most likely participated in more than a few as well. Some simple and easy, some incredibly complex, but all with the intention of moving the perception of the brand closer to what the prospective customer wants to buy (even if requiring change in what the marketer has to “sell”).
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Business-to-business (B2B) blogging is be a great way to forge relationships, talk with customers and prospects, demonstrate thought leadership and dramatically increase visibility in natural search results for targeted search terms. Done right, it ultimately drives substantial traffic when others in the media and blogosphere link to compelling or noteworthy content. Yet the Fortune 500, many of which are B2B companies, has been slow to embrace blogging.
Last year, Forrester Reesearch reported that only 29 of the Fortune 500 companies were blogging. While the number of large companies blogging is still relatively small, that number more than doubled in 2008. Continue reading rest of the article at Search Engine Land.
When assessing a market opportunity, most marketers start with profiling their potential customers based on objectively determined variables called “demographics”. A simplistic winnowing would include who they are, where they are, what they do, and their scope. Again as we know, a second profiling approach is through “psychographics”, which goes beyond demographics to examine how customers think, why they think it and, most importantly, what they will do as a result.
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What are you afraid of? Launch a blog; people go negative on you, and you could lose some business, right? Why even give your critics a platform to be critical, or worse, bad mouth your company, brand, products, or services? Hey, doesn’t this fly in the face of everything we know about marketing, building brands, and protecting brand equity? Why concede an inch of space to detractors?
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By now, I’m sure you’ve all heard about Getty Image’s PicScout bot that’s crawling the internet searching for unauthorized use of their images. It looks like it’s been around for at least a couple years. If you haven’t, well, Getty Images is a client of PicScout [www.picscout.com], an Israeli-based company employing technology that essentially trolls the internet searching for images and comparing algorithms to libraries of companies they represent. Getty Images is one of several stock image sources PicScout lists as clients. With a glance on their customers webpage, you’ll see they also list Corbis, Image Source, Super Stock, and others. (more…)
Years ago I was exposed to a psychographic segmentation model developed by Dr. John Cragan, at that time a Professor of Communications at Illinois St. University. By the time my colleagues and I became involved with Dr. Cragan and his model, it had be tested and applied in a number of B2B categories. Most importantly, the tests and applications validated that the approach was, in fact, purchase behavior predictive. That was important because the most recognized segmentation model of those times, VALS, developed by Stanford Research Institute, was lifestyle focused and with no direct correlation to buying styles. The same was true of Young & Rubicam’s Cross Cultural Consumer Characterizations model for global application. But Cragan was different.
Dr. Cragan posited and proved that there were essentially three different buying styles (although there could be also be permutations, with one style being primary and another having some degree of complementary influence). Those three buying styles were:
• Righteous: Accumulating and evaluating information. Establishing criteria through which to assess competitive alternatives. Doing it the right way. Not the “Innovators” in the Product Diffusion model; instead the “Early Adopters” characterized in that approach.
• Pragmatic: At first glance, the price-driven purchaser. Oftentimes “deal” or promotion driven. But not always…because the concept of lifetime value is not foreign to some in this segment, particularly when the pragmatism is supplemented by another buying style influence.
• Social: Often the most easily identified and thus predictable, the social purchaser is often dealer dependent. And even more often will wait to see what those whom he has identified as leaders will do/will purchase. Not doing the work, but benefiting from those who do. Primarily “Late Majority” in the Product Diffusion model, but could sometimes drop into “Laggard” mode as well. (more…)
If you want some great insight into corporate blogging, both B2B and B2C companies, check out the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki, a directory of Fortune 500 companies with business blogs. The wiki, started as collaborative project between Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson and Socialtext’s Ross Mayfield, is a wiki compilation that’s following active public blogs by company employees blogging about their companies and/or products.
With Mayfield, Easton Ellsworth of We Know Media and John Cass of PR Communications have joined the effort to expand the project. Included on the site are lists and links of blogging Fortune 500 companies, example blogs for each (many have multiple blogs), examples of other social media in use (Twitter, etc.), and reviews. As a side note, you can also write and submit your own reviews of Fortune 500 corporate blogs there. (more…)
I saw a headline on CNN that made me laugh the other day. It said “Ebert and Roeper to leave ‘Ebert and Roeper.’” Boy, I’ll bet that show will never be the same!
Clearly, a B2B company isn’t a TV show. But this little news item might be a good excuse to do a little reviewing of your own. Exactly how deep does your company’s positioning really go? Is it a something everyone in the organization believes in and can recite on cue, or does it depend on the performance of the lead actors and a small supporting cast? It’s not uncommon for a B2B company to define itself by the personality and style of the executive(s) at the top. (more…)
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