You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘social media’ tag.
With new businesses implementing online marketing and blogging strategies every day, more and more business owners are now taking on the daunting task of online marketing, and they’re looking online for help on where to start. This can be a seemingly great tactic, albeit dangerous. The danger lies with the massive amount misinformation floating around. Because of that, I wanted to clear up five popular myths in order to help you avoid unrealistic expectations, expectations created by new businesses about the wonderful world of online marketing.
Thanks to Marketo for sparking my idea to take the opposite approach of their post.
And now, without any further ado, the list…
1. If You Build It, They Will Come
This common mistake is the inherent weakness of the “Content is King” argument. Creating content by publishing blog posts and articles does not mean search engines nor visitors will find your content. The truth is that even the best and most deserving content usually does not win because “Content + Marketing = King”. This is where search engine optimization and social media marketing have an effect on your success.
2. Creating a Twitter and Facebook Account Will Help Your Marketing Strategy
I’ve seen it a hundred times. A business wants to ‘get social’ and start focusing on social media marketing and interacting with their customers. So, they setup a Facebook profile page and a Twitter account and phew… that was hard. And now the traffic, customers and comments should come rolling in…yes? Wrong.
Leveraging social media for B2B sales and marketing success takes time, effort and some strategy. Expect it to take a little time, some research and learning on your end and a lot of tweets and updates to really get going (unless you’re a big brand). If done correctly, it can be a huge benefit to your marketing goals, sales objectives and your customer service.
3. Reading Online Tips and Techniques is a Substitute for Professional Help from Experts
The Internet is a large, large place full of great information. The problem is the percentage of content that is trusted, referenced, truthful and written by credible experts is particularly small. The fact is, what you read online is mostly opinion, made-up, you name it and should not be substituted for real facts or expert advice. Think of any medical website or advertisement and the message they throw in the fine print “This information is not intended to be a substitute for medical advice or treatment. Always seek the advice of a qualified professional.” If you understand and follow that methodology to keep your body healthy, do the same for the health of your business and its marketing strategy!
4. Automate Everything You Can to Save Time
This is yet another classic mistake caused by efficiency overload. Some things can be automated. Other things should never be automated. Lead scoring, company research and sales intelligence, tracking search engine rankings are a few examples of aspects that automation can save a great deal of time. However, other aspects like search engine optimization, demand generation and conversion optimization to name a few should always be manual. Sure, there are tools you can use to help, but these tasks are more of an art than a science where automation has no place.
5. Being Successful Online Is Easy
Probably the biggest oversight that companies fall prey to is the misunderstanding that being successful online is easy. What may have worked in 1998 definitely does not work in 2010 and success is much, much harder now-a-days. Search engines and stiff competition have taken away most “fast-track” online marketing efforts. Yet, companies are still misinformed and, just to name a few, still:
…think that a “set it and forget” approach will work (Not so much. It takes real work!)
…want to spend as little as possible to get great results (When has this ever worked?)
…want #1 rankings in less than a month (LOL! Really?)
…give IT departments more control than they do marketing departments and SEOs
Yesterday marked the one year birthday of the SalesView Buzz tab. The Buzz tab launched on May 11th, 2009 as the first Twitter integration for CRM (including Salesforce, Oracle CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, NetSuite CRM.) While the launch was received with a great deal of enthusiasm by media and analysts (after all, what journalist wasn’t smitten with Twitter in the Spring of 2009?), the benefits of having Tweets about customers and prospects available directly within CRM were not immediately obvious to many B2B sales people.
Similar to the adoption pattern for our Facebook mash-up and LinkedIn integration before, customers and prospects started to identify and leverage actionable sales intelligence from the social media stream. One of my favorite anecdotes comes from a meeting with the VP of Sales at a key customer account a few months after we launched the Buzz tab. As part of our regular quarterly account review we walk customers through recent features & enhancements. This included the Buzz tab at the time so we had him bring up the SalesView Buzz tab (i.e. Twitter & Google blog search) for his own company.
As it turned out, one of the most recent Tweets mentioning his company was a person looking for competitive product recommendations:
- “We’re evaluating marketing automation solutions – (our customer) vs. (competitor #1) vs. (competitor #2). Thoughts?”
TA-WEET! Yes, that was a hot lead and yes he was impressed. The icing on the cake was that within a few minutes the VP of Sales had logged in to see the Buzz tab for himself and by that time someone had already responded as follows:
- “Definitely (competitor #1)… we went through the selection process over 1 year ago and have been happy since.”
TWUH-OH! He interrupted our meeting to make sure the right sales rep followed up on this lead immediately, before his competitor (or their fans) could further slant the conversation to their favor.
Now obviously you will not always have hot leads like these land in your lap but this example does speak to how important a customer acquisition channel Twitter has become. As with other traditional and emerging channels, it provides new ways in which to listen and engage with the new, social customer (a.k.a. Customer 2.0) . The nature of Twitter, which is real-time and entirely public, requires that you sales reps keep an ear to the ground at all times, lest your competitors should be the ones to pounce first.
Guest post by Santosh Shukla, InsideView Hyderabad office.
Posting on Twitter, updating a Facebook profile, putting that Youtube video demo and uploading pictures to Flickr may be free of cost, but it’s wrong to think that social media for marketing and sales is free.
Social media are now standard tools of the Sales 2.0 workplace. But if you are like me, the “social” part of social media sometimes gets in the way of the work. That means you inadvertently spend some time to look at the tweets of people you follow, retweet some and end up spending much more time than you intended. Similar things happen when you go to LinkedIn to find a connection, and end up reading and joining irrelevant discussions.
Thus, a result-oriented foray into social media turns out to be a long walk into unknown (but interesting) woods and by the time we realize, the damage is already done. Time is money, and you’ve just wasted a pile of it.
Here some tips that I use to get the most out of social media while staying focused:
- Link your Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook accounts to save the time and effort of updating same status/message at different places.
LinkedIn with Twitter: https://www.linkedin.com/secure/settings?twitterSettings
Facebook with Twitter: http://www.facebook.com/twitter/
- Create lists on Twitter to follow tweets on related topics like Sales2.0, Golf, psychology etc. to be focused on reading only what you want to read at that moment.
http://help.twitter.com/entries/76460-how-to-use-twitter-lists
To follow the tweets of the IV 20 Top Sales Industry social media users here – http://twitter.com/skshukla/Sales2-0
- Use intelligent tools that allow you to focus on the crux and not deviate by being in your work window. SalesView helps you to read relevant blogs, tweets of the prospect that you are targeting within your CRM so you don’t have to leave it to get the social media benefits. It also finds the LinkedIn connections and Facebook friend connections for prospect accounts within your CRM.
- Follow top 20 Sales Industry Social Media Users and some more stars to get the latest and greatest information and views of the Sales (and Marketing) industry without spending too much time elsewhere.
- Talk to people who have pioneered in linking social web and enterprise, the creators of term “socialprise”.
I am sure you have some more tips that you use to efficiently use your time on social media and get the desired results. Please feel free to share them.
To follow all the Sales2.0 leaders’ tweets, just follow @skshukla/Sales2-0
