martyweil.net

5 Lessons Learned After 23 Years Serving Business-to-Business Marketers

As I celebrate 23 years in business this month, I wish to thank you--my clients. It is you who pushed me to take a leap of faith and start working independently in April 1990. It is you who have been supportive, appreciative, and loyal. And, most importantly, it is you who provide me with the work I do each day.

I have learned a lot from my clients during the past 23 years. Here are five things my clients have taught me:

1. How to understand their needs
2. How to maximize the value I bring to them
3. How to support their career aspirations and goals
4. How to harness the creative talents of others 
5. How to transform their vision and ideas into winning content

So, thank you again for your support.

You have played the key role in making my entrepreneurial dream come true.

Mobile Communications Article Appears in Inbound Logistics April Issue

Mobile communication tools deliver shipment visibility, worker performance, and asset-tracking data directly to managers, no matter where they are. My April feature (Mobile Communication: Connecting Supply Chains On The Go) in Inbound Logistics explores the use of mobile communications tools for these purposes.

If you enjoy the article, please share it across your social networks.

 

Worsham's 7 Steps to Improve B2B Web Site Lead Generation

Use of the corporate website is central to virtually every B2B marketer. How to increase the leads the Web site generates is an ongoing challenge

Recently we came across a post by Sarah Worsham of Sazbean Consulting which recommended a number of simple improvements to address that challenge. They’re well worth considering:

1. Contact Info
   One of the easiest improvements is to make sure that your contact information is readily available throughout your website — not just on your Contact Us page. If you have a phone number, put it on every page, somewhere at the top where it’s easily seen. You want customers to be able to contact you when they want to, without having to go searching for your information.
   
   
2. Fulfill need or solve problem
   So much of the copy that’s on business websites is about the features of a particular product or service. Instead, put yourself in your customer’s shoes, and think about what problem your service solves or what need your product fulfills. Talk in these terms instead of a feature list.
   
   
3. Calls to action
   Calls to action are very important on business websites. If someone gets to your site, reads all your stuff, what do you want them to do next? Make sure that you tell them exactly what the next step is. For example, at the bottom of the product or services page, ask visitors to contact you for a free quote — put the contact form right on that page to make it as easy as possible.
   
   
4. Enticing content
   Content is why people come to your site. Either via a search result, or a link from another website or a social network. Providing content that is enticing to your audience can build up your return traffic, as well as increase your reputation as a valuable resource. One of the ways to do this is through blogging, but you could also build the content on your website with things like videos, how-to articles, product specifications, and answering frequently asked questions,
   
   
5. Lead collection
   One mistake that many businesses make is to have zero ways of collecting leads on their websites. If someone is interested in what you’re selling, you want to know about it. The easiest way is just to add a contact form or two to your website. But you can also collect leads by offering something of valuei n return for names and email addresses. Something like a free e-book or document that offers some valuable information that your potential customers would be interested in.
   
   
6. Landing pages
   Many businesses spend tons of time working on their homepage, but the truth is that with search engines driving much of the traffic to your site, only a percentage of people who come to your site enter on your home page. Many more will enter on pages that fulfill a particular need that they are searching for. This means that these entrance pages, or landing pages, can be a valuable place to spend some time making sure they’re working as hard as they can for you.
   
   
7. Measure and improve
   Without some sort of measurement, it’s hard to determine how well you are doing. Should you continue to write about the topics you’ve covered previously? What parts of the website are working really well? Are there pages that people are entering your site that you should convert to lead generating landing pages? All these questions can be answered by measuring. Free tools like Google Analytics are a great start. Measuring will increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your efforts.

This is solid advice, clearly stated. I'm happy to share it here.

My Twitter List of Social Media and Content Marketing Thought Leaders

If you are interested in following trends in social media and content marketing, I invite you to subscribe to my hand-picked list of Twitter experts. I rely on this Twitter list to monitor news and conversations about social media marketing, content marketing strategy, podcasting, and related technology.

I hope you find the Tweets of the experts on my list as useful and interesting as I do.

B2B Digital Marketing Trends and Developments

Just before the turn of the year, Uri Bar-Joseph, director of marketing at Optify, published an article on marketingprofs.com that listed 10 trends for B2B marketing in 2013. Now that we’ve entered the 2nd Quarter, it seemed a good time to revisit these and see if they’re unfolding as expected:

1. Digital marketing will continue to grow
2. Digital marketing services will surge
3. Content creation services and software will proliferate
4. Integrated marketing will gain popularity
5. Direct mail will make a return
6. Big Data applications will emerge
7. The immeasurable will become measureable
8. Pay per click (PPC) will decline as budgets move to other paid solutions
9. Marketing spend on software will increase
10. Sales responsibilities will move to Marketing

From my perspective, he’s batting about .800. Based on interactions with my clients, the only trends we’re not seeing strongly are the return of direct mail and the decline of PPC. The digital impetus remains a barrier to the direct mail business, though the author tied the return to the use of online connections. That of itself says something about the dominance of digital in the B2B sector. As to the decline of PPC, I continue to see strong use of those tools, such as Google’s Adwords.

We would hasten to add another trend we're seeing: the leveraging of existing content into ebooks. The rapid proliferation of digital readers and tablets such as Apple’s iPad are making this a logical move for many B2B marketers.

I've taken part in that myself, and if you have any interest on how this works and how to do it, I'd love discuss the subject with you.

 

3 Ways to Keep Your B2B Blog Post Titles Effective

According to Shakespeare, when words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain. Obviously the Bard lived before the age of the blog.

A recent post on blog-trends.com made me think about how many posts are titled haphazardly, spending those few precious words in unproductive ways.

Titles are important— they can draw readers into a blog or send them off to the next one, so they should be written carefully not tossed off like an afterthought.

The author suggest three ways that blog post titles can be crafted more effectively:

Keyword research

Keyword research is a great search engine optimization tool that allows you to find which terms people enter into search engines most frequently. Knowing which terms have the highest ranking and putting them into your post title allows you to have a better chance of improving your own post/ page ranking in a search engine as well. For example, if writing a post about floral tops, you will want to search for similar terms and phrases to see which variations are getting the most search traffic. The search term “floral shirts” gets much more search traffic than “floral blouses”, so you should consider using the first term in your post title. Everyone uses different words and phrases, so it’s important to know your audience. Think of what you would be typing in Google if you wanted to land on a post related to your topic, then see if the terms have good rankings or if a better term would fit. Edit your post title accordingly.

Consider using numbers in the title

People love lists. Post titles such as “5 Ways to Speed your Software Implementation” or “3 Ways to Better Manage Inventory” have a more powerful with the numbers included. Consider, for example, the success of the content on Buzzfeed: a high percentage of their articles use numbers and lists in their titles and are shared thousands of times on social media sites such as Facebook and Stumbleupon.

Use restraint

Two aspects of effective blog titles are the length/number of words— and the words themselves. A title that’s too short can be too broad of a search term to get any benefits Adding more substance to the title, will yield more specific search results. You should also keep in mind that a title that’s too long would make your permalinks look silly, especially if you have the date or something else before the title. Choice of words is critical. Any word that can’t be pronounced or defined by the average reader is going to turn them away from reading your post. As a blogger, it’s good to be creative, but keep in mind you want people to understand what you are posting about.

Whether you’re addressing a broad consumer or specialized business audience, these tips make sense.

As Shakespeare said, “Oftentimes excusing of a fault doth make the fault the worse by the excuse.” As far as I'm concerned, there’s no excuse for weakening your blog post by titling it badly.

Importance of Content in Finding Your Niche in Social Media

Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics, Digital Leader and Crisis, put it this way:

We don't have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is how well we do it?

Part of the allure of social media is that it “addresses the world,” but when you think of it, you really don’t want to speak to the world— just that part of it that is interested in the things you are; your industry, your products and services, the developments and issues that affect these things.

In a post on businessgrow.com, columnist Srinivas Rao refers to what he calls “Social Media’s Mass Attention Myth” in speaking to how social media users overreach in their use of the tool. He suggests that users throw out these questions—

• How do I get more traffic?
• How do I get more eyeballs?
• How do I grow my audience?

and concentrate on providing exceptional content. “Diminishing those who spend their valued attention with you to nothing but metrics and measurements is tragic,” he says.

Rao’s use of social media started to flourish when he “focused on how to make my content as valuable as possible for the people who were already there, even if there were only a few of them.” This is how to build a community.

Virtualsocialmedia.com recently posted a number of steps to establish and target a niche market through social media:

1. Conduct some market research focused on defining which part of the market your products and services should be targeting.
2. Choose the right social media channels.
3. Create plenty of useful content.

Again, content.

An article in Inc. echoes this further, recommending “instead of reaching the masses with your social media campaign, hone in on your target customers with the content they need.”

The Niche Marketing Blog puts it this way: “The real power (of social media) lies in the niche marketer’s ability to interact, to comment, and to respond to the stream of information in which they are competing.”

By definition, B2B marketers are more targeted than their B2C counterparts, so they should have a leg up in leveraging social media to effectively find the profitable fish amidst the amorphous school.

For years, we’ve been helping our clients do that effectively and efficiently through superior content and writing. If you’re in a technology-related business, we’d love to talk about how we can help you leverage social media to your advantage.

Origins of the Universe According to MIT and Max

Woman teaching geometry, from Euclid's Elements. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the 1990s, I did content creation work for a man named Max, a man considered by many to be the Father of Emulation Modeling.

I remember Max as a genius, working alone, who not only was a brilliant mathematician but also held a law degree for the express purpose of defending his software patents.

Recently he was brought back to mind when I read an interview with another Max, MIT physicist Max Tegmark, in an article published in Science Magazine. In that piece, titled “Do We Live in a Mathematical Equation?” Tegmark says it is not enough to say math governs our universe, but that reality itself is a mathematical structure.

“The beautiful mathematical regularities that have been uncovered have typically been unifications, where instead of having one mathematical description for this and a different one for that, we realize there’s a single mathematical structure that encompasses all of it.,” he says. “So for me, it would be a natural conclusion if everything could be unified, if there’s a single mathematical structure that is our reality, and all of the mathematical structures that we’ve discovered before are part of this more beautiful whole.”

In fact, he asserts, there’s no evidence right now that there’s anything at all in our universe that is not mathematical.

It seems that Tegmark is not the only one on this track.

Scientific theorists say if the universe is a numerical simulation, there should be clues to it in the spectrum of high energy cosmic rays.

In a post on the MIT Technology Review, researchers at the University of Bonn say there is a way to see evidence that we are being simulated, at least in certain instances. (This has to do with a number of things that got our heads spinning, like the problem with all simulations is that the laws of physics, which appear continuous, have to be superimposed onto a discrete three dimensional lattice which advances in steps of time— and whether that lattice imposes any kind of limitation on the physical processes we see in the universe. Turns out it does, and that we could confirm or rule out the theory of simulation by further exploring something called the ‘GZK’ cutoff.)

At this point we were brought back to our Max— and some of the conversations I had that left me, well, grasping for meaning.

I imagine he’d say that emulation, not simulation, is more applicable to the universe.

Emulation is the process of mimicking the outwardly observable behavior to match an existing target. The internal state of the emulation mechanism does not have to accurately reflect the internal state of the target that it is emulating.

Simulation, on the other hand, involves modeling the underlying state of the target. The end result of a good simulation is that the simulation model will emulate the target that it is simulating.

Enough! As Max used to end some of our sessions.

I’m left with the understandable thought that though I wasn't working for God, I was in some way doing God’s work.

What are the Ramifications of Research Linking Social Media and Brands for B2B?

A post on Nielsen’s blog points to the extent social media is impacting brand marketing. Citing the Social Media Report recently published by Nielsen and NM Incite, a Nielsen/McKinsey company, the research shows that consumers are spending considerable time using social media— using it to discover, research, and share information about brands and products.

Among the findings:

• 60 percent of consumers researching products through multiple online sources learned about a specific brand or retailer through social networking sites.
  
  
• Active social media users are more likely to read product reviews online, and 3 out of 5 create their own reviews of products and services.
  
  
• Both women and men are using social media to tell others about the products and service they like— 81% of females; 72% of males.
  
  
• Consumer-generated reviews and product ratings are the most preferred sources of product information among social media users.

The study notes that social media also plays a key role in protecting brands. More than half of social media users write products reviews to “protect others” from having bad experiences, while many are using the tools to engage with brands on a customer service level. Their expectations are considerable: 42% of 18-34 year olds expect customer support within 12 hours of making a complaint or lodging an inquiry.

While this study clearly focused on business-to-consumer use of social media, I can’t help but think its import has ramifications for the B2B sector.

How are you planning to use social media? What has its impact been for you in the B2B setting?

I’d love to hear your reports from the frontline.

Managing Editor Acknowledges Weil's Contribution to Magazine

From LinkedIn:

Over the past few years, I have assigned Marty several feature articles and case studies for Inbound Logistics magazine, and have been consistently impressed with his ability to grasp new concepts, explain technical details in relatable terms, and create engaging, insightful editorial content. He is reliable, adaptable, and an eager collaborator.

- Catherine Overman, Managing Editor at Inbound Logistics magazine