By Greenmatthew82 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
By M Muneer: in the age of social media and mobile proliferation, no company can expect to leave them out from their marketing arsenal. It is said that much of the global growth in Internet and mobile usage will be driven from India in this coming years. Yet, many companies here are not ready yet to embrace this medium effectively. For instance I have not seen many companies optimising their websites and emails for mobile platform. I also have yet to see their Google+ profiles. And almost all of them do not have a content marketing strategy. The scenario gets dismal when it comes to B2B companies. There social media and mobile marketing are unheard of. The defence is that their buying pattern is not like consumers and social media users. And almost all of these companies have rational thinking, multi-level decision making process. I find it quite absurd that when these decision makers are also users of social media and mobile platforms when it comes to their daily lives. As you know content and social media are the siamese twins for success in B2B marketing. You need both of these to drive business and innovation in your industry and even for driving disruptive growth in the coming years. In a marketplace where email marketing has disastrous open rates, the Return on Investing (ROI) of marketing cannot be substantial without the twins. Creating and executing a social media and content strategy is core to your growth. Here are some pointers for you to get induced into the future way of increasing ROI of your marketing bucks. First, use a specialist to optimise your website and e-mails for mobile. More and more people are spending increasing amount of time on their smart phones and hand-held devices. In fact, one recent study says more time than they take for eating and sleeping. They in fact use it while eating and they also use it just before going to sleep. The estimate is that more devices will connect on mobile than on personal computers this year. So if you are planning an email campaign with big images on top, your message is unlikely to get any attention as most people will have to scroll down through these on his smartphone and they will not have the patience to do that. They will simply assume that it is not that important if one has to first send a picture before a message. Next, if you are like the majority of B2B clients we know of, start a profile in Google+. It is the best way to boost your rankings in search engines. Therefore being part of Google+ is not just an option any more. This is of critical nature in the B2B sector effective immediately. And it is not at all difficult to start off here. More advanced options can be brought in later on. Third, make sure that your business has Facebook presence and unlike your personal FB profile you must try to get more than “likes” there. Typical B2B marketer just pushes something out through press releases and hopes to get some “likes” and comments. You must plan your content from the point of its chance of getting shared. If people start sharing only you will see better reach for your campaign. There is a good way to check the right content. Look for sponsored posts that can resonate with customers. If you are not willing to spend money to promote that message you may not want to post it anyway. Fourth, your content marketing strategy should be valid and same for all social media. No more it is right to do one strategy for FB, one for Twitter. We hear this occasionally but this is not an effective method. As a business owner or CEO you should ask what your content marketing strategy is and what we are trying to build as a brand with the social media. You will need to identify your target segments, the keywords that are searchable online about your brand or company, your learning from current and past content marketing, and the KPIs to measure your marketing effectiveness. You will also need to map your content to customer personas and introduce a calendar for tracking. Using video in your content makes enormous sense today as majority of people prefer to view a video online than on FB. You should also consider adapting the same video for WhatsApp, SuperChat and other mobile Apps. This will increase your brand width. Finally, involve other departments while planning for the content. It is important for marketing to include customer service, after sales service, product development and sales while developing the actual content. It may be highly beneficial also to do a session with some of your key customers if feasible. This can be done by one on one questioning as part of your new product blue printing. It may be of interest to know that we have tied up with the globally-acclaimed AIM Institute to provide radically different ways to innovate in B2B space. If you are in the B2B space and want to drive organic growth with low risks, it may be the right time to embrace B2B New Product Blueprinting. (M Muneer is the CEO and Managing Director of CustomerLab Solutions and a well-known author. Customerlab has collaborated with leading minds of the world for strategy execution and service excellence) Source: mydigitalfc.com
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