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B-to-B Firms Need Content Marketing

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Not everyone using device for notes! #converge...

Not everyone using device for notes! #convergesouth via soulati

You’re a business-to-business firm; perhaps a mid-sized business with no marketing team. You know you need marketing; however, beyond setting up a basic one-dimensional website you’re unsure what comes next.

Sound familiar?

It should and does, most likely. There are many organizations, firms, companies and business units scrambling to piece blended marketing together in order to communicate and sell to business audiences.

While there’s research everywhere saying B-to-B marketing is blending and blurring with B-to-C marketing, there are still firms that will never market to mass audiences of consumers. There are still businesses that will remain steadfast with its services offering and sell to other businesses and never to consumers.

It’s this type of business, often with an entrepreneurial approach I’m thinking about in this article today.

In order to elevate the firm’s brand and earn exposure, there are a variety of program elements to recommend. There’s one approach, however, that is the strongest recommendation and that’s content marketing.

Power Up The Blog

The first best recommendation is to launch a firm blog. The blog is owned media; you control the message and frequency of the writing. It can become the traffic hub for all types of content creation, including:

• Educational information
• Q&A with a guest
• What Is…Series
• Themes explored and explained
• Guest profiles/features
• Breaking news
• Events announcement
• Recap of a presentation + SlideShare deck
• New product launches

Share on Google+ and LinkedIn

Every B-to-B firm should claim its brand identity on Google+ business page and LinkedIn company page. The owners of the firm need to develop personal profiles on each and begin building their networks on these social channels.
All the blog content being written should get shared on these channels alongside industry articles relevant to the firm’s services and interest.

Blend Digital With Content Marketing

When we suggest digital marketing, it means developing content to generate leads. This content can be free downloadable material like an e-book, white paper or research. It can also be a thought piece on a related issue or perhaps a tip sheet or news bulletin.

There are landing pages developed to encourage people to submit an email for the content, and your firm starts creating a list with which to engage in the future.

It’s not as simple as it sounds; however, when you imagine the vast number of users combing the web for information, your content marketing has to be highly useful. Instead of giving it away free, add an email capture form and consider how you’ll keep people interested with your informational content.

Consider a Message Map

When you’re unsure of how to present the firm to external audiences, there is a nifty tool called a Message Map that helps provide answers to all the 5Ws of the firm. A Message Map is helpful in extrapolating answers from executives and getting approval from leadership on how best to position a company going forward.

This book provides a step-by-step approach on how to Message Map. You can consider its purchase right here https://MessageMapping.co.

Message-Mapping-Book.jpg

https://messagemapping.co

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Soulati Media On The Street With Millennial Entrepreneur

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Chris Craft

A young up-and-comer is impressing the heck out of the social media marketing sector, and you need to know him.

My distinct pleasure this morning is to introduce you to Christopher Craft, @ChrisQueso, with whom I spent oodles of hours at ConvergeSouth where we both spoke and had the same flight back.

What makes my head spin is everything he’s doing and so much more. He’s an entrepreneur managing his youthful firm, he blogs here and also doing a full-time gig for another employer. As a daddy to two (listen for what I caught him saying in the wee hours pre-conference!), he’s way on the run with three smartphones he totes for each job and the wife.

Did I say he is also a published author of O.P.E.N. Routine, a personal branding book?

Please meet Chris and follow him in all those places. Thanks, Friend!

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13 Social Business Tips To Be Like Amazon

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king-queen.jpgIt was inevitable. The Apple has finally fallen from the tree. In its place is Amazon, the astonishingly innovative company with sales of $61 billion that continues to bulldoze through industries with acquisitions of consumer-products companies, online sites, e-stores, clothing and accessories, beauty products, and just about everything under the kitchen sink including The Washington Post.

Yes, Jeff Bezos last week announced his purchase of The Washington Post for$250 million for the purpose of ______ insert best guess.

As Fast Company states in its September, 2013 issue, “Amazon has done a lot more than become a stellar retailer. It has reinvented, disrupted, redefined, and renovated the global marketplace.”

Apple built its empire under a force to be reckoned with who is no longer of this plane. It focused on new technologies and really smart devices that spawned mobility for the technology savvy and millennials.

And then we learned last week that it’s a new day, Android has assumed control of the mobile phone market. Another previously secure realm wrested from Apple’s grip.
Back to Amazon. As the powerhouses in mobile cellular technology and tablet duked it out for an ever larger decreasing slice of the pie, Amazon steadily grew its empire as an answer to the every man.

Amazon realized the consumer is in control; the consumer has the power.

Consumer is King.

As you well know, we’re in the post-social media adoption era. Consumers are on board and have built mini-empires of their own on Facebook and blogs. There is mass consumption of content.

What’s more, consumers now have the simple ability to complain, and influence purchases. When the pocketbook is no longer free flowing for the latest novel gadget and gizmo by Apple, then consumers turn to online shopping for the best deals.

How did Amazon do it? Through blood, sweat and tears; through ample quarters of no gains, and by recognizing consumer is king.

13 Social Business Tips For Your Company

Scale these 13 tips from the Amazon playbook to your business:
1. Innovate or die.
2. Insulate against irrelevance.
3. Embrace change.
4. Be creative and be human.
5. Serve your customers everywhere.
6. Become a social business.
7. Engage leadership in social media and earned media.
8. Make your consumer king.
9. Breed loyal followers.
10. Always look into the future; carpe diem.
11. Track, analyze, test, learn, execute; repeat.
12. Be smart and thoughtfully smarter.
13. Build a solid and efficient infrastructure.

Amazon is ripping up retail like the roadrunner, and the big box retailers are shoring up their defenses. The shopping mall as we know it is dead. Get out while you still can.

50 Small Business Blogs To Watch: Infusionsoft Infographic

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Soulati-Media-logo.jpgThis is the coolest thing since sliced bread! An accolade that needs sharing.

Soulati-‘TUDE! is included as a 50 Small Business  Blogs to Watch! 

Scroll on down this so very well-done infographic from Infusionsoft, and you will find a PR section with mention of this blog in esteemed company with Spin Sucks!

THANK YOU, INFUSIONSOFT!!

50 Small Business Blogs Inforaphic Infusionsoft 570px 50 Small Business Blogs to Watch [INFOGRAPHIC]
50 Small Business Blogs to Watch by Infusionsoft

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Big Brands, Consumers And The Festering Sea

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multitasking-toilet.jpgWe’re on the verge of a massive sea change; it’s festering. Companies are scrambling to find the next money maker to compete, to retain earnings, to be profitable, to stay clean and away from the eagle eye of Uncle Sam litigation and taxes.

Everyone is trying to make a buck; yet, the lowliest of low is regarded as the fall guy. Who is at greatest risk of toppling and never recovering? It’s not big business, that’s for sure.

It’s you, me, we, us – the consumer.

Brands Are In Bed With Investors

They have to be; that’s how the bread and butter get served at breakfast. To make investors happy and to finance struggling business units, corporations are de-volumizing everything possible.

For years now, we consumers have noted smaller cereal boxes, candy bars, beverages and personal hygiene products. Now, even Kimberly-Clark and Proctor & Gamble are desheeting.

Kimberly-Clark Corp. is now selling “bulkier” yet “stingier” Kleenex tissue, says this story in the Wall Street Journal July 25, 2013, “Desheeting” Shrinks Rolls, Plumps Profits. Each box of Kleenex has 13% fewer sheets with higher or the same retail prices.  Taken from the story, “Kimberly-Clark executives told analysts that they expect the practice to benefit the company’s consumer-tissue unit in the second half of the year.”

Several weeks ago, I bought a 12-pack of Stella Artois. When I popped a coldie, the bottle was 11.2 ounces rather than the customary 12 ounces with the same or higher price for this premium beer. I wonder how much the manufacturing expense was to retool all the factories to make the green bottles smaller?  How about that packaging? Did they save two inches of cardboard on the carton?

When a consumer gets disgusted and turns to brand B to find a better price point with more volume, the quality sucks. We either pay more for less to get the quality we’ve been spoiled with, or we pay the same for more and poor quality. What’s it going to be?
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