Customers as Social Media Advocates

Many of you now are quite familiar with my enthusiasm for supplementing your traditional outbound marketing strategy with an inbound marketing strategy - getting customers to find you in online communities.

A large part of this strategy requires your planting 'seeds' of your brilliance -- your thought leadership, ideas and creative, innovative thinking for solving business problems -- in forums, blogs and social media platforms where they can be found by people interested in what you have to say. Taking on a content marketing orientation or creating a mini-publishing house, with the purpose of providing a relevant, compelling source of content (information and knowledge) on a regular basis is a significant aspect of building a relationship with a prospect and being successful here.

I tend to discourage blatant product or solution pitches as a source of content in your inbound strategy. It undermines the credibility you're establishing for being about solving business challenges and not just selling product. If and when a prospect is interested in learning more about your solutions, they will find their way to your website and be able to consume vast amounts of product information.

Why not instead seek to enlist your most satisfied customers as your social media solution advocates? How much more powerful would it be for a prospect to hear how impactful your solutions are from a company who has vetted several offerings and found success with your products versus hearing it from you? I'd bet it's a pretty big difference.

Here's an example -- if you're a member, go to LinkedIn Answers and ask a question, say about what CRM solutions are out there that people could recommend. Check out how many answers come from marketing and sales people associated with the vendors they recommend (some people state their company affiliation, but some don't. Talk about integrity). See a credibility issue there?

But how much more impact do the same answers from customers have? Especially those who state they have looked at several different solutions and undertaken a detailed vetting process. It's a significant difference amongst those people seeking an unbiased opinion on what works and why.

Recruiting these types of advocates is not difficult. Once they are on-board and (hopefully) have fallen in love with your company and it's products/services, they would probably be enthused to share their experiences as they have a vested interest in helping your company to do well and grow. You could also incentivize these customers with promotions, service discounts or even chotzkes to gain their assistance. Make it easy for them to identify forums, blogs, social platforms where they could add their 2 cents, and make sure they know that they would prove helpful even providing as little as a sentence of positive feedback.

I would also stress here that you in no way attempt to shape or affect the feedback they would give (which carries some risk, but you should have a strong sense of the type of feedback they would provide at the outset). Assure them that it's completely up to them to provide an honest and principled accounting of their experience with your products and service.

I think you'd be surprised how many of your satisfied customers would love to help spread the word about how terrific your company and it's solutions have been for them.

Secrets for a LinkedIn Group

As you build your outbound marketing strategy through the use of various online social networking tools, here's a tip for creating a LinkedIn Group.

Many companies I feel miss the boat when they establish a LinkedIn presence for their company. Often a company will create a profile under their company name. That's fine, but think about how that affects the credibility and impact of the content and information that you impart. Right off the bat, I'd suggest that most LinkedIn members would be at least slightly biased against much of what you have to say as part of an ongoing effort to sell products and services.

Now while it's true that selling solutions and services is your company's mission, you also (ideally) provide valuable thought leadership, data, problem solving, innovation, new ideas, thinking, etc that provides unbiased value to your intended audience. And they would welcome that type of expertise being available to them.

Consider instead creating a group that instead speaks to your industry and can be easily viewed as a rich community that promotes and exchanges thoughts, ideas and discussion about industry topics, business issues and creative ways to solve those issues. Many posts will speak to (and ideally support) many of the tenets of your company's core value and solutions, but many posts will not. And you may have to be prepared for discussions that don't necessarily promote your company's point of view.

But think about the credibility that a group like that would have with your targets. A free-flowing exchange of ideas that at their core have the best interests of helping people to do their jobs better. That is the essence of a real outbound marketing orientation, where prospects and customers flock to read about and discuss the latest ideas and content that make them better at what they do.

A great example of this is one LinkedIn group I belong to called Pro Marketers - For Marketing Professionals.

It was established by the marketing company HubSpot as an online community that discusses how to reach your best customers online through techniques like inbound marketing, search engine optimization (SEO) and social media. Which just happens to be what HubSpot does.

I find it to be a valuable forum, with very little hard selling going on. And it's caught on as a credible community to discuss and debate inbound marketing.

'Landing Page Makeovers'

I've previously talked about the importance of dedicated landing pages for any of your marketing outreach vehicles -- such critical aspects as form design, providing one 'door' for the respondent to walk through (no multiple links on the page), web analytics on each page to see where your traffic is coming from and to monitor page drop-offs, etc.

It should also be noted however that for those companies that have embraced more of an inbound marketing orientation, and are beginning to plant seedlings of content throughout the web, giving ALL your web pages a 'landing page makeover' might not be a bad idea. By that I mean as your entire website begins to reflect your relevant content, links to that content come into your site from various places (not just from spots where you have a dedicated marketing program in place).

Although it wouldn't be feasible to make every one of your website pages a dedicated landing page, you can create standardized page templates that contain in each margin either static buttons/links to dedicated landing pages within the site, or in fact newsletter sign-ups. Those buttons/links can route a surfer to either a gated demo, free trial, contact us form or even live chat. A great example of that is what Marketo does:

This design can be found on EVERY web page on their site, thus turning each page into a de-facto landing (or at least routing) page. That way when anyone hits a page anywhere on your website from any outside link, you've made it that much easier to start a dialogue, capture data and begin the online relationship.

Buyers Finding Sellers

In my recent white paper 'The 7 Secrets for Generating Quality Leads in a Recession' I talk about establishing an inbound marketing orientation -- the process by which prospects find your products and services rather you trying to find them. It doesn't have to necessarily supplant your current outbound marketing strategies (at least not yet :^), but it should at least run in parallel.

In a recent survey MarketingSherpa found out that 8 out of 10 deals were struck with prospects initially seeking out and finding the vendors they considered and the vendor they ultimately chose. The voluminous amount of information and data now available online has led to this sea change in the buying process (and the marketing process). The web is the first (and sometimes only) place prospects/buyers go to educate themselves to make informed buying decisions.

And it doesn't mean they necessarily go to a vendor web site, at least not in the beginning stages. The ubiquity of research sites, user reviews, blogs, online communities, social networks, et al allow these buyers to first stay abreast of new ideas, technologies and innovations, see similar challenges to problems they also have and then read up on how like ppl/companies solved their problems. All this before their first knock on a vendor's door (or website) and a demo of how their solution satisfies the buyer's needs.

The issue for forward-thinking marketers then is, how do we get ourselves included in those initial awareness/interest phases of the buying process? To help inform the prospect's understanding of the best solutions that may be available to him? And to make the connection between smart, helpful ideas and products/services that are built upon those ideas?

And the answer of course is to establish your company or brand as a business problem expert and as a credible and trusted source of useful knowledge, expertise and information. Marketers have always known that content is king, but these days, unbiased, educational, business-expertise, 'what-makes-you-an-expert?' content is where it's at. If you haven't yet, identifying and regularly communicating your core value in the form of your company thought leaders publishing those thoughts should be of paramount importance as you set up an outbound marketing strategy. The online channels to publish this intellectual property are defined -- blogs, share sites, social nets, company websites, podcasts, etc. Now your focus needs to be on consistently generating the ideas, education and answers that address and solve critical business issues and establish you as a trusted partner.

Top Tips to Increase Marketing ROI from Industry Thought Leaders

I thought this was good post today on Marketo's site Increasing Marketing ROI: The Top 5 Tips from our B2B Thought Leaders on how to increase campaign ROI. It's consistent with what I've been discussing recently about the importance of inbound marketing (being found, creating compelling content), as well as the significance of lead nurturing, testing and integrating all your various channels to make sure they're working in concert.

Inbound Marketing Summit - April 28-29 in San Francisco

Noticed today the upcoming Inbound Marketing Summit scheduled for April 28-29 in San Francisco. (There are two additional summits, one in Dallas May 27-28 and again in Boston Sep 30-Oct 1). I've been talking quite a bit about the importance of either adding to or transforming your marketing orientation from an outbound strategy (you finding prospects) to an inbound strategy (prospects finding you). This summit brings together a number of people who are advocates of inbound marketing (including a sharp PR guy I've worked with at McCann Tim Marklein of Weber Shandwick... full disclosure - Weber is an IPG company). Also noticed that tech marketing guru Seth Godin is scheduled to attend as well as Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media, who's an expert on technology matters and Web 2.0.

Should be some terrific topics discussed and I'm aiming to attend myself.

Content Value

I've spoken many times about the importance of establishing an inbound marketing presence (getting found by customers rather than you looking for customers) and the three linchpins of an inbound strategy (content creation, social media, SEO). This article today by Bryan Eisenberg on ClickZ 'The Value of Content Marketing' does a great job of recognizing and summarizing the types of content organizations should develop and how to go about creating content, determining what's valuable and prioritizing accordingly. Nice read...

Inbound Marketing Lessons

Another good interview today from HubSpots Internet Marketing Blog. They talk with Brad Blake, Director of Interactive Media for the State of Massachusetts, on how the governor's office is using the web and inbound strategies to communicate with constituents. Some really great points that help validate the power of inbound marketing, across all kinds of industries and organizations.

Content Is STILL King

In doing some research for a potential new client, I've come across a number of tech websites that have the same issue... that of organizing their content in a product-centric fashion vs a customer-centric fashion.

With today's post from Hubspot's Inbound Internet Marketing Blog The One Content Question Marketer's Should Ask I'm reminded that many companies, especially the tech co's I came across in my line of work, utilize their websites as brochure-ware and mostly provide information from the company's POV. In addition to being unengaging, boring and a tough way in which to be credible and relevant, it does nothing to support your goal of being recognized as a domain expert, a solver of problems, an innovator in your field. Which in turn will do nothing to support the chances of your content getting passed virally and getting you discovered as a leading voice in your industry.

This becomes especially important if you're trying to evolve your marketing presence as more thought leadership and being an expert in your business discipline. Inbound marketing runs on providing knowledge, ideas and content that make people smarter and better able to do their jobs. Your content should be in a narrative that speaks directly to customer needs, that frames your message in ways that speak to saving money and time, creating efficiencies and business process improvements. Help prospects define and understand the business problems they face, recognize their needs, satisfy their needs and do it in a compelling way that makes them feel like you're talking directly to them.

If you want your content to be discovered as highly valued knowledge, it can't be blatant sales pitches. You'll have zero credibility.