Should Blogging Be on Your B2B Marketing To-Do List?
For this week I went through an article stressing the need for B2B marketer to participate in the Web 2.0 Media specifically Blogging.
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IT Marketing: Should Blogging Be on Your B2B Marketing To-Do List?
Author: Mac McIntosh
For the past few years, you’ve heard so much about blogging that you’re reluctantly concluding that now might be the time to join the parade. Yes, blogs do have a place in the IT marketers’ arsenal, but only under the right circumstances.
Blog Basics
A blog is a personal diary. A daily pulpit. A collaborative space. A political soapbox. A breaking-news outlet. A collection of links. Your own private thoughts. Memos to the world. Your blog is whatever you want it to be. There are millions of them, in all shapes and sizes, and there are no real rules.
In simple terms, a blog is a web page made up of short, frequently updated articles, or “posts,” arranged chronologically like a journal. New stuff shows up at the top, so your visitors can read what’s new. Then they comment on it or link to it or email you. Or not.
Since blogs were launched, almost five years ago, they reshaped the web, impacted politics, shook up journalism, and enabled millions of people to connect with others and have a voice on the Web.
Should You Blog or Shouldn’t You
The reason you probably know the definition of “blog” is that blog readership is high among IT professionals like you. In August 2006, IT information-search company KnowledgeStorm surveyed 4,500 of its registered users, who are typically IT professionals. Of those surveyed, 80 percent said they read blogs, including 18 percent who read them daily and 33 percent who read them weekly. Keep in mind the percent of IT professionals that read blogs is dramatically higher the overall percentage.
While there are millions of blogs online, including my own B2B Marketing Blog, consider that Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that only 39 percent of Internet users read them. Before you decide to enhance your brand image and awareness with a blog, make sure your target audience is among the 39 percent of Internet users who read them.
I recommend considering blogging if and only if your audience is reading them and if you need a venue to demonstrate your expertise (branding) or are looking for additional ways to move up in the SERPs (awareness).
If you’re more concerned with driving leads and sales, pass on blogging for now. There are plenty of marketing tactics that will have a more direct impact on your bottom line.
If you decide you need to establish your expertise by blogging and sharing what you know about subjects related to your products and services, then keep these six blogging tips in mind:
• Often, techies write blogs for technical decision makers. However, some of the most effective business blogs are written by management personnel for business decision makers.
• Regardless of your editorial focus, the best-read blogs avoid hype and self-congratulatory content. Instead, they focus on content useful to their intended readers.
• To create awareness about your company, products and services, keep in mind that blogs tend to be favored in the Web’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), especially if it’s optimized to your industry’s keywords. Optimizing your blog can go a long way toward helping your company be found by prospects actively searching for what you sell.
• To gain and maintain readers, you need to keep your blog fresh. You’ll need someone who has the expertise, writing skills and time to frequently post new blog content. How frequently? According to a research study by public relations firm Porter Novelli and market analytics company Cymfony Inc., only 24 percent of bloggers post once a week or less (I belong to this camp). Some 39 percent of bloggers post several times a week and 37 percent post daily or multiple times a day. I recommend that you plan to post new content to your blog weekly to start. You can always turn up the frequency later, once you’re sure you have the ability to keep up the pace.
• If you’re looking for links from the blog to your Web site to boost your Web site’s search engine results, host it on a different server than where your Web site is hosted. Search using a phrase like “blog hosting” on Google or your favorite search engine to find a number of inexpensive blog hosting options.
• To move potential customers through the awareness, inquiry, consideration, and purchasing cycle using your blog you must relate all of your blog topics back to your services or products, to articles within your site, and other sales lead generation tools.
With 20+ years of high-tech marketing communications experience, B2B sales lead expert, M.H. “Mac” McIntosh can help you drive sales for your hardware, software, and information technology products and services. To learn how you can generate more sales leads, improve awareness for your IT products and services, reduce your cost per lead and ultimately generate more profits for your company go to http://www.sales-lead-experts.com/category/high-tech.cfm for a free Decision Makers Kit.
European B2B Trade Portal Goes Multilingual
In the recent years, Eurotradenet.com (earlier Eurobiz.eu) has made itself known as the powerful network of minor and medium sized buyers and suppliers all over the World. With its new and revised Tools and Services, ETN helps the Buyers to research the products effectively and in a swift manner, it generates leads and gets back supplementary information for assessment.
Continuing with the long established tradition of enhancing itself, the dedicated research team at eurotradenet.com, has added new features for the benefit of the Buyers and Suppliers registered on the site. The most striking feature is the support for 10 different languages. Now one can access this powerful European B2B Trade portal in Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, Spanish, German, Polish, Greek, French and not to mention English. This provides a better accessibility to the buyers and a wider reach for the sellers. The multilingual functionality coupled with the latest Search engine Optimization techniques ensure the highest ranks the suppliers and their products pages on all the major Search Engines.
With its all new Twitter functionality, one can easily keep track of all the new changes and updates on the website. Not stopping at this Eurotradenet.com has added the latest and most widely used Web 2.0 social bookmarking icons, so that it creates effortlessness for its subscribers.
How to derieve maximum benefits from your B2B Marketplace Listing ?
5 Tips to Optimize B2B Marketplace Listing to derive Maximum Benefits
Author: B2B Marketing Consultant
An Online B2B Marketplace is a trade portal where wholesale buyers and sellers gather to promote their products and services. Such Online Marketplaces are effective source of leads as there are thousands of buyers searching for products through these portals. The Online Marketplaces operate by creating profile pages for businesses and their products which are highly optimized for search engines and rank higher for many search results.
But donot fall in to the trap of these companies saying it is a cake walk. In fact marketing through B2B marketplaces can be quite a tricky thing. The limitations of the space and the nature of buyer affect the marketing aspects. Hence it is imperative for the b2b marketers to know about the limitations and exploit the benefits to the maximum. Here are a few points a b2b marketer must consider to derive maximum benefit out of the B2B marketplace listings:
Optimized & Concise Content
There is a limitation on the space available for you to showcase your products. The amount of text you can write and the images you can upload is limited. So as a B2B marketer you have keep the content highly optimized with a good sales copy. Take care there are no spelling or formatting mistakes.
Price
More options for the buyers’ means that you have a limited time and space to make an impact. The price is definitely the factor that would affect the buyer’s decision. Moreover some marketplaces also provide listings based on products prices. The secret of being successful when dealing with the B2B market is that you need to keep the prices down and trade fast. The clients are interested in the products that are latest and hot in lower price.
Latest products
Always bring in your latest and best products online. Take care which products you showcase on your company profile page. Evergreen products like “generators” do not need regular updating but seasonal goods like fashion products or consumer electronic products should be need seasonal updating. Don’t sell the surplus products online. If you want to do so, sell them in the auction websites.
Display Accreditation & Verifications
The easiest way to generate trust on your company or business is by getting accredited and verified by globally renowned Agencies. After verification, the “Verified by —-” label is provided which can be showcased on your company introduction page and product details page. This helps build trust and can fetch you better prices.
Language & Communication
Communication means the languages, skills, and response time. Fluency and expertise with English is must in International Trade. Many B2B marketplaces provide instant messaging facility, in such cases it is mandatory that you are able to talk in the language that the prospect can understand. Also the responses should be in good English.
These factors help formulate a better marketing strategy for your b2b business. For more information you can visit one of the best B2B Marketplace: http://eurotradenet.com
Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/online-business-articles/5-tips-to-optimize-b2b-marketplace-listing-to-derive-maximum-benefits-1024236.html
About the Author:
The author is an Online Media Consultant who has been consulting various businesses including Small and Medium B2B Businesses on how to use the power of internet to increase the ROI. This will be a series of articles targeted specifically for B2B businesses through our the world. To know more about b2b trade portal please visit http://eurotradenet.com. Visit http://b2b-ideas.blogspot.com/ for more marketing ideas for B2B Businesses
B2B Wholesale Supplier and Buyer Directory
Internet has become a great place to promote the B2B businesses in the recent days. Not every small and medium businesses have a web presence to market their products. Some who do have a website presence suffer from low traffic. B2B Business Directories, Online or even Offline, present a useful opportunity to advertise the business and products.
Online B2B Directories are categorized list of businesses providing various ways to market and advertise the B2B businesses and products. Online B2B Directories are generally free to use with specialized services coming at a price. When a business is registered on a B2B directory a web page is created on that showing all the information you can provide about your business. Some directories also provide listings for the products with each product listed on a separate page. Certain good B2B directories like Eurotradenet.com also add a special feature to this webpages. The web pages are created in way that is more search engine friendly, hene not only your business has an online presence but it is promoted in such a way so as to rank higher for the product related pages. This way the Product and company pages are more reachable for the buyers looking out to buy similar products. More traffic means more leads
Businesses benefit not only by ranking higher on search engines but also through the registered buyers on these directories who use such B2B directories for finding quality products and wholesalers. There are other benefits of registering on these B2B market places:
1. Multi lingual support ensures a much broader reach.
2. Specialized services like appearing in Newsletters published by the directories and a much more premium placement ensures higher visibility for the Supplier and Product Page implying more leads
3. More space for product details and photographs means better impact on your potential buyers
4. As you a list of happy customers you benefit by a favorable rating for your business and product.
5. Listing under proper categories help bring more targeted traffic on to your webpage
What is B2B & How its different ?
Wikipedia describes B2B as, “…transactions between businesses, such as between a manufacturer and a wholesaler, or between a wholesaler and a retailer.” The volume of B2B trade is much higher than the other trade models like business to customer, business to government etc.
Generally people don’t know the dynamics of B2B trade because they just don’t directly come in the trade process. For example, an automobile manufacturer makes several B2B transactions such as buying tires, glass for windshields, and rubber hoses for its vehicles. The final transaction, a finished vehicle sold to the consumer, is a single (B2C) transaction.
How Marketing assumes a different aspect in B2B?
Marketing aspects are different in B2B than in other forms of trade like Business to Consumer transactions. In Business to consumer trade, for example, the consumers and the advertising media are more easily identifiable. A cosmetics manufacturer can promote business by splash the attractive advertisement across the print, electronics and online media. Lots of research has also been done in the B2C domain so as to help the companies in formulating the marketing strategy. However B2B does not have the advantage of such insight. Marketing the B2B products assumes different aspects. Other factors setting the B2B business apart are as follows:
* In B2B business there are “Fewer Buyers”. Though market may actually depend on the type of product but in general terms it can be said that there are fewer buyers for such specific B2B product. Owing to this and other reasons like competition, a B2B marketer has to be on look out for other Geographic markets for his products. This may not be as easy in case of SMEs.
* For a B2B Customer the “Buy decision” assumes much more importance than that for a B2C customer. This is because of various reasons like high product costs, volume of purchase, reliability of the product or service or technical products e.g. heavy machinery. All these reasons make the B2B buyers to adopt a more stringent purchasing process. Most B2B companies have a dedicated team of specialized / technical personnel handling the purchase department. The decision of such teams is not affected by the same factors affecting B2C buyer. For example factors like “Impulse”, “Packaging” may not have a role to play in a B2B transaction. In B2B transaction factors like technical specifications, quality, and service assume a more important role. All these factors make B2B transactions more particular.
* B2B sellers also don’t operate in the same way as B2C sellers. The pricing assumes different role. The prices may vary for different B2B buyers. The degree of customization is also higher. In addition to these B2B sellers have to make different strategies depending on different type of customers. The B2B customers can be other SMEs, Wholesale distributors, Dealers and other partners in the supply chain.
These are just a few ways in which B2B marketing may differ from the conventional B2C marketing. Further we will be discussing about the various ways and new ideas to market B2B businesses specifically SMEs.
