B2B Monday Myth: Social Media Isn’t Measurable

by

B2B Social Media Measuring TipsThe Myth: Social Media Isn’t Measurable.

The Truth: The Question Isn’t Whether Social Is Measurable, But What Specifically to Measure.

Here’s some good news: social media is one of the most measurable marketing approaches. The bad news: there is no single metric that determines your overall success. Sounds discouraging. But just because you can’t snap your fingers and find the magic number doesn’t mean you can’t get incredibly useful analytics – data that can help you generate quality leads. So, how can you use your findings to build awareness, connect with customers, and ultimately bring in money for your company?

Here Are Three B2B Social Media Measuring Tips to Get You Started:

  1. Assess the right social media metrics: 
    • Demographics: Your audience offers a whole host of metrics that can help you measure your overall success on social media. Using each channels’ analytics (more on that below), you can determine what your audience is interested in, their ages, locations, and more. This can help drive your social media advertising efforts and guide your overall content program, too.
    • Engagement: While growing your network should always be a goal, the number of people who are interacting with your content is key. Quality is better than quantity when it comes to social media. And your followers won’t stick around and engage if your content is lacking. Engagement levels on each piece of content you post can tell you which types of content and what topics resonate most with your audience.
  2. Utilize analytics tools: Measuring your reach and engagement manually can be daunting. Individual social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, all have easy-to-use analytics tools through their websites. You can also employ outside third-party services to track these metrics for you, such as Google Analytics or Klout. The more robust the program, the better.
  3. Understand how people move from social media to your website: How do you turn your social media insights into action? You can utilize Google Analytics to track the traffic from your social media sites to your website. The data can tell you which social media platforms are the most effective and what content best resonates with your audience. For example: If you are sharing the same white paper across Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, but find in Google Analytics that the only conversions are coming from LinkedIn, consider shifting your strategy on Twitter and Facebook to focus on other forms of content.

Measuring your social media correctly is worth the time and effort. It helps you fine-tune your strategy to drive more engagement and add new prospects into your sales funnel. And your analysis can help your content department determine what will work best. Assessing the success of your social media can add value to your company in more ways than one. Time to start fine-tuning!

Continue Reading


B2B Monday Myth: I Don’t Need a Social Media Editorial Calendar

by

b2b social media editorial calendarThe Myth: I don’t need a social media editorial calendar.

The Truth: A social media editorial calendar can help your brand get ahead, and stay ahead, of the online chatter.

The continuing rise of social media for B2B brands means that the online platforms are not only here to stay, but they’re now some of the most dominant tools marketers have in their arsenal. Despite being a valuable asset, social media can also prove to be one of the most difficult tools to effectively manage. Due to this, utilizing a B2B social media editorial calendar can help marketers plan their content, maintain a steady online presence, and target key audiences. In fact, the use of an editorial calendar has proven to be so helpful that 56% of B2B marketers now say they’re using them.

But, there’s a lot more that goes into planning your brand’s editorial calendar than simply slotting posts in at miscellaneous days and times. Keep in mind that social media is just that: social. Your calendar should be carefully designed not only to target your audience, but also to engage them.

Here are 3 tips to maximize your B2B social media editorial calendar, and drive engagement:

  1. Develop and utilize categories for your posts. Building your editorial calendar requires ample research and planning. Make sure that your posts are as varied and diverse as your audience (while keeping true to your brand’s voice). As you develop your calendar, devise specific categories for your posts, such as holidays and campaigns, and decide which types of content you’ll be sharing, like videos and blog posts. Do you want to wish your followers a Happy Pi Day? Do you have tweets for a specific campaign running throughout the month of February? Do you share your blog posts to LinkedIn on Wednesdays? Managing these types of content helps to diversify your social media presence, and your audience will be thankful for it.
  2. Find out when your audience is online. One of the key features of your B2B social media editorial calendar is timing. You’ve developed a strategy and created content, but when do you post it all? Conduct some research on your audience. Are key market segments online most during their lunch break, or right after dinner? Do they interact more with content on weekdays as opposed to the weekend? Experiment with a variety of posting times, assess resulting engagement, and schedule accordingly.
  3. Be consistent, but tweak for each channel. The most important part of social media presence is maintaining your brand’s voice. This being said, you can still create a uniform narrative for your brand while tweaking your content for each channel. Moreover, some platforms are more prevalent among certain audience than others. Finding ways to craft your message to fit the channel and its audience can help target those demographics more effectively. For example, try scheduling an open-ended post on LinkedIn to spark discussion, but a tweet directing users to your website on Twitter.

The constantly active and ever-changing world of social media means that planning is becoming more and more vital for marketers. With news and updates continually rolling across your timeline, it’s important to develop a calendar and stick to it. Having a plan in place is a surefire way to prevent poor performance, and also allows you to focus on the here and now. Need help getting your B2B social media editorial calendar started? Drop us a line.

Continue Reading


The ABCs of B2B Search Success in 2017

by

 

b2b search engine marketing

Follow These Basic Tenets of B2B Search Engine Marketing To See Success in 2017.

2016 was a year of big changes in the field of online search. With the switch to a mobile-first ranking system, the addition of expanded text ads in paid search and an overhaul of the desktop search results page that reduced paid ad space, our friends at Google are always doing their best to keep us in B2B search marketing on our toes. And 2017 is sure to be another exciting year full of changes, opportunities, and challenges. That makes right now the perfect time to reflect on some of the basic tenets of B2B SEO and SEM strategy. Or as I like to call them — the ABCs of B2B Search Success in 2017.

A – Audience Awareness

Whether you’re freshening up ad copy, running a new link-building campaign or strengthening your keyword lists, the most important thing is to focus on addressing the needs of your audience. It’s easy to get caught up in your own sales goals and deadlines, but if you don’t think of the customer first, you won’t each either one successfully. Research their demographics and interests. Understand who they are and where they are before you plan your SEM. Imagine who you’re writing that ad copy for and what things they care about. Remember what drives them to search in the first place, what problems they have, and the answers that you can provide when adding keywords. Mastering this skill will give you an edge over your competition in 2017.

B – Business Opportunities

We all work in different business sectors, with different goals, priorities, and concerns. Whether you run one large SEM account or multiple accounts for different sub-brands, it’s important to keep your strengths and weaknesses in mind. And keep a sharp eye out for SEM opportunities that play to those strengths. This will help you pinpoint the most effective pathway to meeting your goals. Perhaps it means capitalizing on gaps in the search market for your field. Or pushing a specific promotion for a new product launch or bestseller. Or maybe just understanding the seasonality of your product offerings, and adjusting budgets and goals to reflect this. Whatever opportunities and challenges your particular business faces, staying on top of them will help you ride out any changes to the search landscape.

C – Conversion Tracking

For most marketers, conversion tracking is the main pathway to search success. You need to be able to see which pages, keywords, and ads bring home the bacon in order to optimize and exceed your goals. This means taking advantage of every conversion opportunity available. In this modern world of search, your customers are using an ever more diverse set of routes to reach you; you need to follow each one. You’ve likely relied upon standard landing page conversion tracking for years. But now it’s more important than ever to branch out and expand your reach. Call conversion tracking allows you the chance to capture customers that may have been untrackable in the past. As mobile search continues to become the forefront of search, the ability to click on a phone number and speak to a rep is becoming a more viable option than form fills for your busiest customers. Now’s the time to capitalize on this conversion avenue and give your campaigns a welcome boost in the new year.

It’s tough to predict which new innovations and technologies will shape the search engine landscape of 2017. But by sticking to the ABCs of B2B Search Success you can weather any search storm.

Continue Reading