Employees are Real Brand Ambassadors and True Marketers

Do you agree with the caption or not? If not, start believing it from today. Yes, it is true your employee is the real marketer and ambassador.  Don’t you think so? They will be always speaking about the company - good or bad. The situation is at brink and employees are more demanding in terms of almost everything. 

Take a chance

Before social media, it was a different equation. The entry of online moguls like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ has changed the demographics of business. It is important to allow your staff’s presence on social media during work hours for exponential exposure to your business. Do you agree with it? Still no, surveys suggest that micro controlling the staff makes the situation worse and inspires them to preach negative side of your organization. Hence, give them the freedom; connect with them socially to add more values to existing state. Employees undoubtedly communicate to the outside world about the brand they work for. Don’t you think business can utilize this opportunity to promote? Harness employee advocacy for positive results and convert every employee to brand ambassadors.

Connect People

Centralize the process by virtual interactions and integrate the departments for better approach. Push the notification and content to streamline the online management. Communicate through social media for personal touch and allow the staff to share their views. Respond to their posts honestly and unbiased, to add more credibility in the process. Why should you do this? Answer is simple and straight, it inspires staff to speak about the positive side of organization which will boost the online reputation of firm. Positive employee advocacy leads to sharing safe content of the firm in online world. However, before publishing the content, it can be reviewed.  

Recognize and Reward

When you share the contents on social media, it is important to re-tweet or repost for the comments posted. Employees play vital role in this part and help to redefine the business to next level. Encourage them to comment on customer’s view which builds their confidence and sparks healthy competition among them. Recognize talent and award them for the job done which concludes the engagement on positive note. I hope you’re convinced now, choose employee advocacy over capital to increase the financial stability for future engagements as employees are prominent promoters of the establishment. 

Building Brand Awareness – The Path of Storytelling

As the media landscape continues to evolve, audiences are gaining more and more control over the information they view and share. To remain relevant, brands need to know how to tell compelling stories to reach them.

The transformation begins by realizing that your brand is nothing more than an ongoing story—a set of meaningful emotional experiences unfolding between itself and your audiences. Just like stories, brands can be inspiring, clear and actionable, or self-important, bland and confusing. The inspiring ones light up social networks, passing virally from storyteller to storyteller. The others instantly disappear.

Sending B2B Emails – Wait and Think “What is the Purpose”?

No doubt, emails still rules but how much B2B marketers are able to makes use of it as part of their strategy? It’s still a question haunting thousand of marketers and the very importance of email marketing. Many B2B marketers still lack in creating strategic, impactful messages that are designed to help and educate an audience, they are missing out on a big lead generation opportunity.

Email Truths..

Reviewing Marketing Sherpa’s 2013 Email Marketing Benchmark Report revealed that just about half of respondents send out 10,000 to 10 million emails every day – only 15% reported to Marketing Sherpa that they have dedicated resources to produce content for each stage of the buying process.

Therefore, before you press, “Send”, take a good, hard look at what’s in your email. Let’s look at the following questions that would compel you to wait and think about the “Purpose” of sending such B2B emails: 

# Fail – Moment When Hashtags Loses Demeanor

Hashtags was one of the docile feature that might not have been flashy discoveries of the social media age but captured Twitter’s original calling card making a reputable mark. Easy to use and essential, hashtags have been essential the way users find, use and share information converting it as not only an important part of Twitter but other social networks like Facebook and Google+ etc.

Hashtags Presence

Hashtags presence can be judged back from Twitter that when used correctly can help introduce your brand and content to a new league of followers, customers and fans. Over the years several brands have accepted the same trending hashtag and created some of their own masterpiece to benefit from the increased attention and exposure. However there are some, who did not have had the not best of experience, so here we are mentioning the cases for reference while determining what actually went wrong:

Growing B2B Challenges – Heads Up to Fight Better

Is your business “challenge free”. No, it is not and this count embraces almost all B2B organizations. Reshaping economy, changing consumer behavior pattern and complex decision-making process has increased risk rapidly. Knowing what these risks are and fighting them head on can help to ensure ongoing success.

Here are some of the core areas that should be addressed and monitored in order to ensure the health and productivity of your growing business:

Opt in or Double opt-in – The War of Ideologies to Grow Email List

It is a common question while trying to grow email lists “Should I use single or double opt-in when growing my email list?” To begin with, this question should not be treated in silo, the common concern with double opt-in is that it requires the customer to perform the additional step of opening an email and clicking a link to confirm they want to opt in.

Double opt-in – Everyone Slips

So most people slips in the last stage not everyone completes the confirmation step. The reasons can be many may be they didn’t get the double opt-in confirmation email or they don’t get around to reading and clicking the link in the email or have a change of mind.

SMS Marketing – A Lot to Message about In 2013

SMS (Short Message Service) has been an integral part of mobile marketing for more than a decade and SMS has become a consumer favorite rivaling the prevalence and popularity of email itself. It is rather in 2013, when SMS marketing elevated mobile marketing as a platform to the pinnacle of its effectiveness with the mobile masses.

Giving a tough competition to email as platform SMS has acquired new pinnacle but B2B marketers still has to understand and apply the right route to get the maximum use out of it. Lets review how SMS has achieved this new raving status.

Mobile Marketing – Reiterating the Recipe For Success

It happens often a time that a successful campaign is simply by following the right tips. There are many different ways to implement mobile marketing, and the variety of options and techniques is leaving many companies scratching their heads and wondering how to go about doing it properly so that they will best engage with consumers. 

A simple strategy can be simply to look at a bigger picture and not forgetting the smaller details. Mobile marketing is omnipresent and there as many companies that is using it carefully as there are companies who are completely missing the point.

The basic problem – Marketers think reaching audiences in smartphones, tablets are similar to PCs, except for smaller screens.

Struggling with Emails – Follow Simple Tricks for Better Credibility

Emails can be the big problem solver or a creator and it all depends on how you as a marketer manage to employ the medium for your benefit. Some of you, I am sure are still confused if emails should be imbibed within their marketing strategy? Such notions are predominantly present due to stigma of spam – where we do not want to bother our customers by loathing inboxes with email promotions.

Even SEO, that expectantly guarantees top rankings for a particular keyword or pay-per-click marketing that involves major marketing costs, it becomes extremely hard to determine how good your email marketing campaign is now and how good it could be.

Branding Message – Triangulate to Create A killer Value Proposition

Entrepreneurs are chameleons. They are a magician that keeps changing hats as per situation, adapting to whatever role they are required to play. But when it comes to customer, it has to be one thing and there are three attributes that successfully establishes the brand message – consistency, consistency, consistency. And the moment it breaks consumers gets confused. Want to settle down as the first choice, configure your branding message in a killer way.

Is it possible?

Yes, it is..It depends on how well you have to determine that one key message that your product or service promises to deliver.

Adopting Six Sigma in B2B Lead Generation - Manage Gaps in Sales & Marketing

A harsh truth prevailing in marketing borderline, there still lays a pertaining gap in B2B sales and marketing teams when it comes to lead generation. Moreover 73% of business sales leads transferred directly by marketing to sales are not sales ready and only half of the remaining 27% eventually end up being qualified.

Six Sigma principles in B2B lead generation

But things do not have to be in this way, effective B2B lead generation requires a tight symphony between marketing and sales and while closing the gap between them is certainly impossible, focus on the grounds of shared similarities of the two functions.

Let’s check out a five step process for solving the mismatched differences of both functions:

“To Go” Content – The New Age Experimentation Luring Marketers

Changes are happening all across the channel triggered by the changing consumer behavior. The trend started from long content continued till short form of content and now reached a stage where consumers are preferring content that is a concise blend of informative content mixed with a crisp medium confirming best possible knowledge transfer. And as a marketer it’s important to follow these changes and adapt in kind. 

Such phenomenon is not what expected in a short period of time. In just few years we have gone from an even distribution of long term content consumers and short term consumers to an exclusive blend of short term content consumers to an almost exclusive blend of short term content users.

Strategy –Premise for Social Media Success

So everyone wants to get into social media, many already have and others are clueless about it. What makes social media a goliath medium for small business entrepreneurs is that they fear to invest huge amount of time (without strategy) and waiting for desirable results. So have you any idea how social media success looks like? Think about it (it’s not about having one million followers.

Want to make Big – Stop Saying Start Listening

Well it does more good to understand what people actually want to listen. And if you are looking a direction for formulating a superstar strategy, well here’s how you can get started:

LinkedIn Marketing – Explore Interlinked B2B Strategies

LinkedIn marketing continues to create more and more stir as more and more businesses, especially B2B businesses realize the importance and value of creating a comprehensive strategy for one of the largest social networks. Well I must say it’s not an easy task whatsoever. For different channels require different competencies from marketers to master the tricks and divulge traffic.

Studying across different marketing journals, I have come up with 7 excellent strategies where you can interlink LinkedIn marketing to B2B strategies:

Keys to an Awful marketing Email – Endure>Resist>Avoid

Before we begin, I would like to ask a small question: How many of you worry about junk mail and the answer received was quite expected – Not much. Why? Because there is a folder in your email that does it for you and correct me if I am wrong but marketing emails are responsible for 70% of “this is spam” complaints. Such facts can really influence the way email marketing practices that has existed till date. 

Third Party Influencers – The New Brand Carriers

There have been situations when a potential client is unfamiliar with a product or service and the company providing it. Such situations are commonly true in one-time closing situations and also mostly in seldom purchased products. No doubt you may be the best salesperson in the world with a pure sole motive of 100% to serving the needs of your customer. Therefore come the role of third party influences to build the trust, need and hurry necessary to achieve a onetime close.

Why you should go for third party influences? Here are our top five reasons:

Resurgence – Does Database Marketing Still Have It?

Well it’s a question every marketer wants to be answered. Emergence of new online technologies alongwith the changing priorities of customers have made online marketers to move away from this traditional medium and look for greener pastures. It all started during 1980’s when the term database marketing had been first coined leading to numerous articles and entire conferences were devoted to the subject. 

While the buzz around database marketing has cooled off but not its importance to B2B marketing.

The entire internet is filled with definitions of database marketing, but let’s discusses the working definition that would hold certain weight among the current marketers. 

Twitter for Business – Networking Tool that Drives Business

“Twitter for Business”, well the headline alone is enough to generate queries regarding the effectiveness of the site suiting business purposes. It’s extremely important to understand the basics before moving ahead to experiment with the intricacies of newly launched Twitter for Business resource page. Fully equipped this resource page can provide your team with education, tools and success stories to enhance your Twitter engagement.

Unlike the other previous version, the latest iteration organizes content into helpful and goal oriented sections. Major three areas reformed to focus on education, rather than telling business how to spend money advertising on Twitter is:

Viral Tweet – Be A Brave Heart And Do It!!

So yes you want to make a tweet go viral get inspired from some of the biggest brave hearts of industry who made little effort to impress and more to offend. Let’s take an example of Divshot, whose silly April fool’s joke created a stir and attracted over 6,000 tweets and not to mention the desired attention.

Background – Divshot’s is an innovative website development tool which generates professional grade code during design process. Now knowing their customers likeliness for design and good taste it created a new “Geo” website template keeping a light reference to Geocities. Announce grabbed Hacker News’ notoriously cynical community, taking major tech community attention.

Sounds fun, and all of this without a single dime spent. Can any management ask for more? Can we move our attention toward the example right above and think of getting inspire from it. Let’s discuss some top five lessons learnt from it:

Thinking about Branding Change – Think About SEO

Businesses need to keep up with time and think about progressing well. After all every company evolves with time and in this case many B2B marketers who wanted something else is looking for something different and new. Businesses need to keep up with time and so that they develop products and services to keep up with time.

SEO Change:

Some 5 years ago it was acceptable to submit a website to lots of broad directories to get a backlink. But today broad and free directories are almost dead. With this change in the industry it meant that as holy preachers of SEO even we require to change our approach.