“(OK, so you) walk into a coffee shop and notice one of your best customers sitting at a table with several people you don’t know. You walk over to say ‘hi’ and your customer invites you to join them, and introduces you to the others. They are talking about your industry, and you quickly realize that some of those you’ve just met are potential future customers. How you handle the next step is crucial: immediately launching into a sales pitch is likely to alienate the group. On the other hand, displaying your industry knowledge and providing insightful input to the conversation will make those at the table want to learn more from you.
Social media and social networks are simply an online version of that table at the coffee shop. They give you the opportunity to (more…)
August 14th, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
We sometimes get a call from a frantic prospect who says something like “I absolutely have to rank Number 1 on ‘convertible frammis’ by Monday.” Never mind that it’s Thursday afternoon, and that he means through organic search only …no PPC allowed.
We can only speculate as to what motivates a normally sane marketer to take on such a fool’s errand, though naturally a fit of sudden top-management interest/pressure springs to mind (think Dilbert). Of course, we always do our best to help such people… although they rarely end up becoming clients, because their circumstances generally keep them from even hearing our message that (more…)
August 7th, 2008
Posted by: Matt Roche
In a recent blogpost, we talked about how the new social media shouldn’t be thought of only as a means to raise your Google page rank. While that’s still true, there is a rapidly growing relationship between social media and search engine marketing (SEM) that’s worth exploring.
In his recent ClickZ piece, “When Does Social Media Matter in SEM?”, Erik Dafforn offers this clear-cut test: “Social media officially matters to SEM when search engines’ algorithmic treatment of social media sites intersects with user queries.” I.e., when social media pages start showing up in search-engine results pages, it’s time – maybe past time – to take notice. And it’s easy to verify that they are indeed hitting the SERPs more and more these days.
What this means, of course, is that (more…)
July 31st, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
OMG!! We just came across this absolute killer article (actually, only a few bricks shy of being a white paper!) by Jon Miller, “The Definitive Guide to Business-to-Business Marketing in a Recession.” OK, so that may be the most overblown title since Douglas Adams’ “Life, the Universe and Everything”; but please, don’t let that stop you putting it way up on your must-read list.
In part, we liked this piece because it agrees with many of the points made in our own recent blogposts on the topic of the current “maybe/maybe-not” recession (or the worst possible non-recession, as Jon says he likes to call it); and it includes research backup for several of them. For example: (more…)
July 24th, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
We’re continually amazed by the number of our good clients who are happy for us to help them with search engine optimization (SEO) …until it comes time for link building. They’re quite happy for us to worry about their keyword/keyphrase identification, page or H1 tags, alt-tags …all that gritty technoid stuff. But mention inbound links, and often as not we observe a glazed-over expression and hear, “Yeah, yeah, we’ll take care of that over the next month or so.”
Come to find out, on our 3rd or 4th monthly SEO checkup, that virtually nothing was done on the link-building front. Result? …their site is hovering on about the 9th or so page of SERP results, when everything else (more…)
July 17th, 2008
Posted by: Matt Roche
It’s an article of well-placed faith among B2B companies – where sales cycles are nearly always lengthy – that lead nurturing is vitally important.
And that’s in good times, when you may have gotten used to picking off new business like it was low-hanging fruit. But as Anne Holland says in her SherpaBlog post, How to Ride Out the Storm: “In bad times, the branches raise themselves up. Landing new customers is harder – more expensive – just at the time when your CEO holds that ‘How can we cut marketing costs?’ discussion with your department.”
Anne’s worthwhile piece goes on to discuss tactics for (more…)
July 10th, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
A joint survey by BtoB and the Association of National Advertisers last year revealed a gap we’ve gotten used to seeing: whereas only 10% of B2B marketers surveyed viewed social networking as effective, 36% of B2C marketers saw it as effective. The B2B respondents said they used social networks, blogs and virtual spaces such as Second Life primarily for brand-building, rather than generating new leads.
While B2B marketers grapple with how best to utilize social media – and we passed along some pointers on the topic in a recent blogpost – their companies are charging ahead with implementing other uses beyond marketing. So reports Rebekah Tsadik in her worthy BtoBonline piece, “Social networks starting to click”.
Much of this activity is aimed at setting up intra-company, unbranded or “white label” social networks, which have the potential (more…)
July 3rd, 2008
Posted by: Bill Gadless
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