Spring is a good time to clean up your marketing basics, especially if you set annual company goals in Q1. We like to organize marketing activity around CONTENT, SEARCH and SOCIAL MEDIA.
Here are my top 4 tips:
CONTENT
1. Start with your business goals. List the top 3 and tie marketing to these. Make every step move towards Mount Olympus.
How do you know what your stakeholders want to know? Conduct at least 5 buyer persona interviews before you create your messaging.
2. Combine indirect marketing – PR – with direct marketing – eNewsletters, email, print, mailing and the web. Re-purpose press releases, viewpoints, blog posts, customer stories in quarterly, monthly or bi-monthly enewsletters and collateral to nurture your opt-in prospects and customers.
SEARCH
3. Invest in having a professional research your keyword phrases once a year. Skip the free tools. How can you find an SEO professional to do this? Conduct an advanced people search on LinkedIn using “keyword research” and “English” filters.
SOCIAL MEDIA
4. Even if most of your sales leads do not come through social media (and you know this by discovering, during the buyer persona interviews, where your prospects are engaged. You also check the referring sites in your Google Analytics.), set up a publishing platform for your company comprised of twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. We find the APPROPRIATE use of LinkedIn as a sales tool is effective for B2B marketing.
What marketing best practices are working for you? Please give me a shout if you would like more actionable ideas.
