Top Ten Ways to Market Your Business in 2010

With the New Year comes the perfect time to start fresh and renew your commitment to effectively marketing your business. Here are a few ideas from Naz Creative on marketing your business in 2010.

1. Blog It
How many times have we all said, “You know, I think I’ll start a blog,” and then not follow through with the idea? Blogs have become a powerful and important internet marketing tool. What was once considered to be a fun little hobby is now serious business. Blogs can increase your search engine visibility, give you expert level credibility and they can give your customers a place to communicate with you. To get the most benefit from your blogging, flag categories and make them search engine friendly with tags. In addition, remember to create back links from relevant words in your blog posts to your website.

2. Let Your Customers Sell Your Product
Customer testimonials are one of the most powerful forms of advertising there is. This year, ask several of your best customers to jot down a few positive notes about their experiences with you. Testimonials are great material for just about any piece of correspondence including emails, newsletters and websites. Testimonials are absolutely essential to any powerful marketing plan, especially web marketing.

3. Advertise More
Find out where your competitors are advertising and give it a try, or try a brand new option. The key to finding good places to advertise is not to panic and bail out early! Many times business owners give up on advertising before it has a chance to work, so be tough and give it a few tries before throwing in the towel.

4. Generate Some Buzz - Press Releases
Give people a reason to talk about you. Some great ways to get people to notice your business are by offering free food or drinks, hosting a contest, or participating in a charity project. Don’t forget to distribute a press release to generate even more buzz!

5. Roll Out the Welcome Mat
Promote your business in 2010 by hosting an event. Ideas for becoming a charming host include hosting an award presentation, celebrating your favorite customers with a reception or even a simple open house. Remember that hosted events are most successful when they are adequately advertised.

6. Share Your Plans with Others
Use a calendar like the one offered by iGoogle. By adding your events to the calendar and allowing others to see it, they’ll be more aware and more likely to take an interest in what you are doing.

7. Get Out of Your Rut
Pick something about your business and change it. Get a new logo, print new business cards, or even re-vamp your entire website! Adding a colorful splash of variety to “business as usual” is an excellent, time-tested method of perking up sales.

8. Ask Your Customers What They Think
Get ideas and learn how to improve your services by sending out a customer survey. Your customers’ ideas and answers to your questions may surprise you! Customer surveys are the best way to find out what your customers really think about what you are offering.

9. Go Contact Crazy - E-mail Marketing Campaigns
Collect email addresses by adding an opt-in form to your website and your blog. Communicate regularly with your email list by sending web-exclusive offers to your customers. As email has rapidly become the communication method of choice for many, email marketing is a cost-effective and successful method of promoting your business.

10. Get the Facts - Analytics are the way
Track visits to your website and learn where your visits are coming from. Is your traffic targeted, “good” traffic? Google Analytics is an excellent tool for educating yourself on the facts of your website

Outsource Marketing - A Smart Choice For Technology Businesses

Many businesses believe they have only two choices when it comes to marketing - establish an internal department or contract specific services with a marketing agency. There is a third option worth exploring. Strategic outsource marketing provides the commitment of an internal resource and the capabilities of an agency without the operating costs of either.

Comparing Options

If your firm hires a VP-level marketing executive you can expect to pay upwards of $175,000 in salary and benefits just to start. While your new VP may be able develop a marketing strategy, your firm will still have allocate a considerable budget to outsource projects to creative agencies for tactical execution.

Outsourcing services to a typical full-service agency means you pay for all of their services – even if you don’t use them. Operating costs for every department must be absorbed by all the clients. A strategic outsourcing firm combines the best of both worlds. A dedicated project manager works with you to develop a marketing strategy designed specifically to meet your company’s needs. The strategic outsourcing firm then provides your technology company with a full array of marketing expertise under one umbrella to bring your message to an increasingly demanding and hard-to-reach audience. The key distinction with a strategic outsourcing firm is that you only pay for what you need – when you need it!

The first and most critical benefit of strategic marketing outsourcing is a company pays only for the services used for the length of time needed. The marketing team assigned to your firm can be scaled to suit projects of any size and scope. With an in-house team, you have consistent expenses. With an outsourced marketing department, you only pay for resources when you need them.

Breadth of Services

Search engine optimization, online business networks, business blog….marketing tactics and supporting technologies are changing at lightning speed. Outsource marketing provides access to a team with expertise in every marketing discipline. A quality "turn-key" marketing firm can provide specialists in all marketing disciplines as well as vertical industry experts. Time to Focus on Your Core Competencies By outsourcing the marketing function, your internal team will have more time to spend on what you do best: product innovation, customer service or quality control.

"Ins" in the Industry

From knowledge of online printers with 2-day turnaround to friendships with editors, outsource marketing firms bring industry know-how to your firm. Marketing firms have day-to-day contact and partnerships with direct mail list firms, printers, journalists, reporters and more. And we often find uncanny overlaps between a product of one client and the service of another.

Views from the Outside

While an outsourced marketing department takes the time to intimately learn your products, technologies, and customers, its team member do not have years of ingrained company culture. Firm members are not afraid of suggesting radical ideas. Because marketing team members may work on several outsource teams, they often have fresh and objective viewpoints to share.

Why Strategic Outsourced Marketing Makes Sense for Technology Firms

With its attractive advantages, marketing outsourcing might be assumed to be a logical choice for nearly every company looking to grow its business. But certain key characteristics of technology firms make strategic outsource marketing extremely attractive.Staying smart in today’s volatile business environment requires access to resources well-versed in current practices across all marketing disciplines. But technology firms must focus on their intellectual property and product life cycles, and often cannot focus on the latest in marketing tactics. Outsourcing the marketing function lets key executives in the firm to focus on the core competencies instead of trying to keep up on the latest internet marketing strategy.

Consider Strategic Outsource Marketing for Your Firm Today

Companies that outsource the marketing department can focus on their core competencies while a seasoned team of experts handles marketing. Marketing is improved across the board as the entire function becomes driven by objectives, strategies, a marketing plan, and budget.For more information on the benefits of an outsource marketing department, or to arrange a marketing assessment meeting, contact us at 734-864-4094 or visit the Clarity Quest website. Christine Slocumb has 15 years of marketing, business development, and product management experience in Fortune 50 and startup firms. Christine has worked with technology firms on marketing strategy, business planning and marketing implementation. Clarity Quest is a leading Michigan marketing firm.

By Christine SlocumbPublished: 12/5/2007

Polls

Which social media is more important to you on a daily basis?

Twitter
Facebook
Blog
Texting
IM

Vote
Poll Author
Charles Kelly


http://polls.linkedin.com/p/77828/jrubo

Five B2B Marketing Trends for 2010

By Chris Koch

We’re a research organization, so making predictions is fraught with risk. We need to stick to the numbers. But we’ve identified some trends for 2010 that we think will accelerate. Some are sure bets, such as the continuing growth of social media. Others are long shots, because they don’t represent the majority of marketers today—and perhaps never will. But they should. See if you agree:

Marketing and sales will share leadership. Okay, so just 17% of the 31 companies we surveyed in ITSMA’s recent survey, Sales Enablement Practices and Trends: Increasing Marketing’s Impact, have marketing and sales report to a shared leader—say, a vice president of sales and marketing, for example.

But we think this number is going to go up. It has to.

For the past two years, marketers have told us that sales enablement is a top priority. We think that sales enablement consists of more than brochures, data sheets, and tools. It should extend to shared goals and metrics between marketing and sales.

The only way to know whether marketing is improving salespeople’s effectiveness is by having them share accountability for revenue and sales quota goals. Yet of the companies we surveyed, just 16% have shared metrics between sales and marketing. Worse, only 25% of companies said that their marketing and sales groups even have an understanding of each other’s goals and metrics.

That’s got to change. Especially when you consider that many of the activities that traditionally defined marketing—collateral and trade shows, for example—are going away.

Increasingly, marketers are going to become more directly involved in supporting the customer relationship. Some 48% of respondents to ITSMA’s recent Market Pulse survey are going to increase spending on sales enablement, and more than 50% are going to increase spending on lead-nurturing activities such as thought leadership and private events.

Social media becomes integral to the buying process. In ITSMA’s How Customers Choose survey, we found that use of social media among IT and business buyers of technology rose 50% over last year and finally pushed to majority status; 55% said they use social media as part of the technology buying process in 2009 versus just 37% in 2008. More important, we found that executives in large organizations use social media more than in smaller organizations and that C-suite executives actually use social media more than their lower-level buying peers. Just 15% of CEOs and directors said they did not use any form of social media at all, whereas 34% of manager/directors and 26% of VPs and assistant VPs said that they ignore the stuff.

This has big implications for marketers. It means that social media is taking hold within your biggest, most valuable accounts at the highest levels.

This makes sense when you consider what our IT buyers have been telling us for years: that their peers are by far their most preferred and trusted choice for information during the buying process. This year, our research showed that most buyers go to colleagues inside their own companies for referrals of people to talk to about a purchase. No doubt, they would like to expand that circle beyond the company—30% say they rely on peers from councils and communities they belong to, and 29% say they speak to colleagues at other companies for referrals.

Within this elite audience, social media is becoming a tool for expanding the circle of trusted peers that they can call on when they’re about to make a big purchasing decision. Marketers can enable these relationships by creating and managing online communities. Indeed, we’ve seen a dramatic rise in the percentage of B2B marketers that say they’ve built online communities themselves or through third parties such as LinkedIn and Facebook. In ITSMA’s social media survey in April, 43% said they had built their own communities and 54% had built group pages on Facebook or LinkedIn. By October, the percentages were 70 and 79, respectively.

Social media integrates into the thought leadership supply chain. Among respondents to ITSMA’s recent Market Pulse survey, 58% said they planned to increase spending on thought leadership development—nearly as many as the 73% who told us they planned to invest more in social media.

We don’t think that’s an accident. Social media is a helpful new piece in the supply chains for both thought leadership development and dissemination. For example, by tracking employee blogs, you may find some new subject matter experts who can help develop and refine thought leadership. Tweets are the raw nuggets that become blog posts that eventually lead to thought leadership white papers.

And social media tools are great ways to tease your thought leadership content and lead customers and prospects to other marketing channels, such as events and the Website. In ITSMA’s survey Web 2.0 Gets Strategic, 67% of respondents said that driving traffic to the Website was a primary benefit of social media.

The importance of the epiphany stage of the buying process grows. With buyers themselves doing more and more research during the buying process, providers need to make sure that they can be found.

Providers stand a better chance of being found if they create content for every stage of the buying process, including the stage that occurs before customers even think about buying. In the epiphany stage, marketers educate customers and prospects about business issues and future requirements, helping them reveal needs (see The Epiphany Stage: The Missing Link in the Buying Process).

How should marketing accomplish this goal? By creating idea- and trend-based thought leadership that helps clients discover and respond to the most important business issues they face and by taking clients out of the day to day to collaborate and spark new ideas. The best epiphany marketing also gives sales a reason to call on customers to discuss the content.

There’s plenty of opportunity for differentiation in the early stages of the buying process. In ITSMA’s How Customers Choose survey, just 16% of buyers said that their providers are very helpful in showing them the possibilities to solve their business challenges. And just slightly more than 50% of buyers said that providers’ thought leadership marketing is helpful in this regard. Companies that invest in understanding buyers’ business issues and creating good thought leadership around those issues have a tremendous opportunity to stand apart from competitors.

Cloud computing and costs will drive partnerships. In our Market Pulse survey, 42% of respondents said they were planning to increase their investments in partnerships. In part, this is due to already lean staffs being unable to shrink further. Even in the darkest days of the recession last January, 43% expected their budgets to remain unchanged or to increase in 2009. The lean staffs and budgets that have been with us since the dot-com crash don’t have much fat left to cut. Marketers are looking to share costs by working with partners. It’s also an inexpensive way to grow when the economy improves.

But we think that cloud computing will also drive a need for more partnering. The development of cloud-based platforms such as Salesforce’s AppExchange or Apple’s App Store show how partner ecosystems will become more important for B2B over time—much as the “Wintel” platform redefined provider partnerships at the beginning of the client/server era.

What trends do you see coming in 2010?

Turn Inbound Leads into Customers

Marketers have changed the way they handle online demand generation by using thought leadership like white papers, surveys and videos to drive interest in their industry or solution. But for many companies, leads from these inbound methods don’t necessarily mean an increase in potential sales opportunities. Here are some tips to help you convert these inbound leads into customers.

1. Don’t expect a lead generated from inbound marketing to turn into a qualified prospect overnight

When someone responds to an offer for a white paper, it does not mean they have the budget to buy, or the need for your product or service at that exact moment. This is why three-step drip campaigns don’t work, as they don’t engage prospects unless they are already ready to buy at that moment. Instead, marketers must create longer nurturing campaigns that infuse thought leadership with occasional offers for demos, fact sheets or product information. When this information creates engagement with the lead, it causes them to click through a landing page or download information. Be sure to follow up with a sales email or phone call to determine if it’s the right time for a demo.

2. Ensure future offers are highly relevant

Now that a prospect has opted-in to your lead nurturing program, be sure they want to keep receiving your emails and don’t end up opting-out later. According to research firm, MarketingSherpa:

* 82% of prospects say content targeted to their specific industry is more valuable
* 67% say content targeted to their job function is more valuable
* 49% say content targeted to their company size is more valuable
* 29% prefer content targeted to their geography

Be sure to watch for signs that offers aren’t working by reviewing the email reports provided by your marketing automation system. Compare the opt-outs, click throughs and open rates in the different steps of your nurturing program to ensure that everything is performing well.

3. Create offers for each step of the buying cycle

Once someone shows interest, offer them vertical-specific content like industry-overviews, analyst reports, buyer’s guides, etc. This will help drive demand for your entire industry and create better educated buyers who are more likely to make purchases based on value instead of price alone.

4. Make sure solution-oriented and company-focused content is available when prospects are ready to buy

Just because someone has opted into your nurturing campaign does not mean that a prospect knows what product or service your company provides. When a prospect starts to engage in industry-specific content make sure to follow up with offers like product demos, product fact sheets or case studies.

5. Create a lead-recycling program

While marketing may have found the perfect prospect, that does not mean the prospect has the right budget or resources to buy now.

If, after contacting a lead, a rep determines that the lead is not sales-ready, sales should be able to send it back to marketing by adding the lead to a lead-recycling program.

When leads are recycled, they can either be put back into your basic nurturing campaign or, even better, they can be added to a specialized version of the campaign that is optimized for the specific information the rep collected during their interactions (e.g. interests and timing).

By following these tips you will make more of one of your company's most valuable asset, its database.
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Posted by Maria Pergolino on January 20, 2010 in Lead Management Turn Inbound Leads into Customers
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Word Of Mouth Marketing Techniques WOMM

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Why have a Business-to-Business Blog?

In short, because blogs are well beyond the novelty stage, and now a mainstream communication medium for B2B vendors. They are generally trusted and progressively more widely read, and they draw an attractive demographic. They are search engine-friendly and one of the easiest, fastest and least expensive ways to increase the online exposure of your business.

Technorati now indexes more than 133 million blogs; nearly a million new blog posts are written every day. According to a recent study, 77% of active Internet users now read blogs. 51% of businesses view blogs as the most useful social media tool. Forrester Research reports that 91% of B2B buyers use social media in some form, and 58% react to content in social media (including blogs). And it isn’t just middle-management types using social media for b2b decision making; 77% of senior management team members listen to podcasts or webcasts, and 61% visit company blogs.

Consultant Suzanne Falter-Barns has echoed the blogs-are-mainstream theme and suggests that blogs will displace email newsletters and e-zines. Growing and maintaining an opt-in e-newsletter list has gotten more difficult for several reasons. First, due to their proliferation (almost every business now has a company newsletter – I even get one from my garbage collection service!). Second, due to overstuffed in-boxes, largely because of spam. Third, and related to the last point, over-zealous spam-blocking programs end up preventing many legitimate marketing emails from reaching recipients, leading to low deliverability rates. Fourth, they are a lot of work.

Blogs, on the other hand, are fast and reasonably easy to create. Anyone in your company with an interesting story to tell or knowledge to share can contribute. They are less formal than a newsletter. They are interactive. And they are loved by the media as well as by search engines.

Search engines (particularly Google) love blogs, for reasons partly philosophical (Google owns blog creation service Blogger) and partly technical. Blogs make your site “stickier” and more likely to be revisited by prospects looking for fresh, interesting content. A blog is also far easier to build than a Web site, requiring no or at least very limited knowledge of HTML and FTP. Keyword competition is also less intense for blogs and RSS feeds than for commercial websites (through with the rapid growth of business blogs, this is changing).

As blogger Ankesh Kothari has pointed out, blogs are fundamentally nothing more or less than a form of communication. If you can make money using other forms of communication (e.g. email or direct mail), then you can make money with a blog.Most blogs don’t draw large audiences, but with a narrow industry focus, they do draw a highly targeted readership. By creating a blog that provides real value within your industry niche, and promoting it effectively, you can attract those highly relevant readers, create interaction, and enhance your company’s image by demonstrating your unique expertise.