Tune Into The Digital Age of 'WOM'

In this age of ‘Word of Mouth’, how do you leverage social media to connect with B2B customers?

Do you shout it out, get everyone involved, and get them on board?

Do you listen, plan, engage and optimize social media channels?

The reason why it is important to use social media is because it helps you to know:

• Who is saying what about your brand and where
• Who is leading conversation share
• Where your customer are living online
• How to provide value addition
• When and how to engage with your community
• Why customers behave the way they do
• Why they prefer what they prefer

So, why do you need to build a social media strategy?

• To define objectives and integrate it with the overall marketing strategy
• To maintain a unified brand identity and image across the socialsphere
• To utilize various channels effectively and facilitate prospecting
• To integrate communication and build relationships with prospective buyers

When using social media, not every channel is suitable. Find out where your target market is active. For instance, if they are active on LinkedIn, join in on the discussion. If they are active on Twitter, tweet to keep them up to date. If they are on Facebook, post messages to keep them engaged. Check out the grid below, to understand which social media platform is best suited for your requirement.

If you like what you read, socialize it! Post, tweet, ping, poke or pin; let us in your socialsphere as well! 

Augment your understanding of your customer with Social Data
Know your “Share of Voice”
Get your database updated with Social Data

You Can’t Be Serious! You’re Not Multi-Channel Marketing Yet?

• Which is the best media channel to generate results for prospecting?
• Is there ROI - ‘Return on Interesting’ from your content strategy?
• Will it create a generation of prospective customers?

In this noisy and crowded digital world, engaging customers has become one of the biggest challenges for B2B marketers. Almost every day a new marketing channel emerges. It no longer is sufficient to use a single channel, instead an optimized, multi-marketing channel mix is important to engage customers. 

The Age of Multi-Channel B2B Prospecting 

As with any marketing program, a multi-channel campaign should have a well defined messaging strategy, engaging design, timely and precise implementation. 

According to Chief Marketer’s 2013 Prospecting Survey, 56% of B2B marketers plan to dedicate over half of their marketing budget to customer acquisition. Majority of them were focused on finding prospects that would be lifetime customers rather than leads who would profitable in the first transaction. 

Email Marketing as a Prospecting Tool 

Almost 63% of B2B marketers use email to generate new leads, and around 18% plan to start using email marketing this year. Here are some of the reasons why B2B Marketers use email marketing for prospecting and why you should be use it too.

With new marketing channels available, B2B marketers need to constantly revamp their strategy based on buyer behavior and interaction.  For instance, from 2012 to 2013, the change in channel usage by B2B marketers for prospecting is quite interesting. Take a look:

• Almost 17% of marketers will begin using email marketing
• Almost 12% of marketers will use online registrations and opt-ins, re-targeted ads and social networks.
• Almost 10% will use PPC and display ad campaigns
• Almost 7% will increase usage of email and tradeshows

Whether the focus is customer acquisition or retention, B2B prospecting is a good way to build a string foundation of customers. By using the multi-channel approach, brands can engage and connect with prospects customers through every touch point to create a customer experience.

At Info CheckPoint, our databases have contact details for you to connect with prospects through various marketing channels. 

Use just one database…

Connect with your target market relevantly…

By email, direct mail, telemarketing or through social media platforms.

Why Social Data is the New Black!

Ever wanted to how much your brand is talked about in the social network?

Wouldn't you like to eavesdrop?

Customers today do their own research and interact with a brand only much later in their buying process. This has made it difficult for companies to gain insights about customers and to influence their decisions. Moreover, when customers do decide to interact, they do so quite selectively.

Here is where social data has become a critical tool. It is one the best ways through which companies can measure marketing campaigns, and observe, analyze and improve social conversations in real time. Tech savvy marketers are using tried and tested marketing tactics and new techniques to improve interaction and increase quality and quantity leads; from direct mail marketing, telemarketing, email marketing to social media marketing.

Techniques of mass mailing done earlier are replaced by more customized forms of marketing. B2B marketers today are segmenting customer groups to implement targeted marketing programs. And social data provides just that information required to organize customers into specific groups and develop relevant messaging that revolves around them.

In all the digital frenzy, positioning your brand could become quite a relentless challenge. You need to be ‘happening’ in the social sphere and the best way to get around is by knowing the right people.

Big Data is something you may already have

Augment your customer analysis with Social Data

Get to know your “Share of Voice”

You got 60 seconds before people close your video!

Imagine this…

• Every month, more than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube 
• Every month, over 4 billion hours of video are watched on YouTube
• Every minute, 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube 
• 70% of YouTube traffic originates from outside the US
• YouTube is localized across 53 countries and in 61 languages

Source: - YouTube Statistics 

So how do you get people to view your brand above the noise, connect and resonate with it through your videos? With ‘YouTube marketing’….

• You don’t have to be viral, tell a story – While viral videos do generate millions of visitors to your video, they may not necessarily visit your website. Instead everybody loves a good story. Telling your story, about the passion of your business, about the history of your brand, will create a better brand connect than unrelated videos of dancing monkeys.
• You got to keep it short - Attention spans of your audience are down to a few seconds. While the receptiveness of people has shifted from words to visual content, even videos nowadays fail to capture their short-wired attention span. Maybe the number of devices a person owns and uses, at a single point of time has something to do with this distracted interaction. A 30 second video is definitely more preferred than a 20 minute one.
• You Have to Personalize and Customize - YouTube is localized across 53 countries and in 61 languages and 70% of the traffic originates from outside the U.S. If you are not customizing, personalizing and localizing your brand message, it may not resonate with the global audience. 
• Get Real, Use Live Streaming – It is always exciting to watch something that’s happening miles away in real-time. Live streaming, used by big brands such as Coke and Intel, has brought the brand experience to millions, transcending geographical boundaries. Get real and share your brand experience with your audience. This definitely makes your brand personal and helps in building trust.
• Analyze and Get Insights, Don’t Speculate – With YouTube marketing it’s not about the number of visitors, it is about who are the visitors. Similar to any lead generation effort, it’s not about the number of people who visited your page or liked your video, it is about how many of them are interested in your business, how many of them can buy and how of them are willing to become customers. 

With video marketing and YouTube marketing, it is important to know the objective and goal of your video first before creating it. It should be aligned with your overall social media strategy, so that all channels are effectively utilized and your audience gains an overall brand experience through various touch points.

Here’s an interesting article we came across on, "How YouTube can be a Marketing Tool for Small Business” 

What you think of our video? Did you close it in 6 seconds?

What’s the Buzz about Social Media?

Buzz in on the chatter! Here’s a snapshot of stats, sayings, cartoons, checklists and cheat sheets. 
As much as an infographic as a monographic…

CHEAT SHEET

Social Media Platform	Best Suited As
Facebook	·         A one-stop platform to provide information ·         To inform about latest product updates, services and events ·         To obtain customer feedback ·         To attach photos and videos for brand association ·         To engage with fans
Twitter	·         To share new developments and upcoming launches ·         To gain opinion from followers ·         To connect with users interested in similar products / services
LinkedIn	·         To connect with like minded professionals in relevant industry sectors ·         To create discussion groups and invite professionals to share views on subjects
Google+	·         To share technology related information ·         To impact rankings
YouTube	·         To share informative and educative videos ·         To share videos related to your business

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