What’s the Value of Social Media in B2B Marketing?

Posted on August 12, 2011 by Dominique

So, you have a business and you’ve gotten your budding empire signed up for a Twitter account and a Facebook page (and perhaps a Google+ Business profile in the future too?). Go you! You’re part of the social media revolution. Cake and champagne for everyone!

Fast forward a few months and you may find yourself asking what’s this actually doing for me? What’s the value of social media? How can I get a ROI out of it? It’s a popular question on a lot of professional minds these days, especially in the case of B2B marketing. “Ok,” you say, “I got on board this train, where’s it taking me?”

Ensuring your business has a presence in the virtual world is an essential part of any successful marketing plan. With that said, it’s easy to get lost in social media. Between looking up relevant industry articles to load up the Tweetdeck and responding to comments on your Facebook page you can start to feel like you’re spending a lot of valuable time and resources keeping up a presence that isn’t necessarily turning into dollars.

Or is it?

I like to think of social media as a networking tool. I know, that sounds rather obvious but if you take a look you’ll see a lot of businesses aren’t utilizing it the way they should. Effective networking leads to sales, especially in the B2B market. Social media can be a great B2B sales tool, particularly Twitter, you just have to change the way you approach networking and sales.

Ever see a business you’d like to pitch your product or service to but had no inside connection? As any salesperson worth their salt will tell you, pitching to someone you’ve built a relationship with is easier, and usually much more successful, than cold calling. You just need a way to get a foot in the door, to get in their good graces, to endear yourself to them, and then the sale will follow. That’s how it happened in the brick and mortar days of sales, right? Well, Twitter can be the tool that gets those lines of communications flowing. The key is to pace yourself and to not be…..sales-y.

It’s important to remember that there are just as many spammers and cold tweeting annoyances out there as there are telemarketers. No one wants to talk with them. So sending a tweet to a new business you’d like to sell yourself to 5 minutes after you start following them isn’t going to hack it. You’ll be written off. Lines of communication will go cold.

Twitter isn’t about broadcasting, although a lot of people seem to think otherwise. It’s about listening. It’s about conversations. It’s about building a relationship. Take your time. See what sort of things they tweet. Retweet the ones that are pertinent to your business and add a short encouraging message in front of it. For example, “Talk about a dog day afternoon! RT @ChicDesigns It’s bring your dog to work day at the office!” Continue reading →

A Marketer’s Secret Sauce to Cross-Channel Marketing

Posted on June 10, 2011 by Renee

As the daughter of a major player in the New Orleans and Gulf Coast food industry, I have been well acquainted with the soulful and delectable menu items my city has to offer since birth. I’m not talking solely about meals that will break the bank, I’m talking the real deal- melt in your mouth- full experience meals. By far it’s one of my top 5 favorite things my dad has exposed me too thus far, he has ruined great food and culture in any other city for me. It’s true folks, Dukky was birthed in the city with the greatest food in the world. We’d bet our lives on it.

If I must be honest, I am not much of a cook myself. I can cook, but I’m afraid I have not “fallen in love” with the experience…yet. I accredit this to first falling in love with the experience of being cooked for (again, thanks Dad). As a result, I’m basically a recipe dependent chef. I prefer the promise of a great meal after a hard day’s work and if Emeril says it’s good then, “BAM!” – sign me up. Continue reading →

Bring out your dead! (marketing tactics, that is)

Posted on March 25, 2011 by Dominique

Finally, someone explained it. Listen up world, as we tell the sad, sad story of the last advertising agency on earth – courtesy of FITC, which is, oddly, an advertising agency.
<a href="http://www.vimeo.com/10251808">http://www.vimeo.com/10251808</a>

Why this video? Well, currently we are hard at work putting our new SMB platform to the test and each member of Team Dukky has a part to play. My main duties have been in assisting new small business clients to draft out their campaigns and put them into action. Small business owners on a whole are a pleasure to work with. Most are eager to dive into the social media integration and live analytics feed our product provides. However, from time to time I’ve been hit with one particular question – why should I have my campaign set up as a share-to-win promotion? Will social media help me at all?

While the answer seemed obvious to me, I have come to realize that many small business owners are operating under the rules of the old guard of advertising. This, my friends, is a mistake. Television and print ads alone are quickly becoming a thing of the past. Consumers are tired of having marketing messages dictated to them. They’re tired of having no control over what sort of messages they’re bombarded with. With the growth of internet capabilities, smart phones and the ever expanding reach of social media into every aspect of our lives it’s no wonder that traditional marketing tactics are failing to work. Think about it. How many people do you know that sit and watch cable television anymore? They don’t. They have Tivo and DVR. They record their shows, watch them on their schedules and, if you’re like me, relish in the fact that they can fast forward through the commercials. That’s right, I work in marketing technology and I hate television commercials. In fact, I don’t even have cable. Why pay $60 a month when I can snuggle in bed with my beloved Hulu? Sure, there are commercials (count em, 3 per episode) on Hulu shows. BUT they allow me to tell them if the commercials are relevant to me or not and then customizes what ads pop up during my shows. Most are even interactive. Hulu listens. Hulu learns. Hulu, is my new best friend.

Consumers do not want to be pandered to. Our lives are too busy these days. We need smarter marketing. This is where digital and social media, with their ability to take traditional marketing further, have taken hold. When I log onto Facebook I don’t see ads for arthritis pills, Dora the Explorer or hockey gear. Why? Because those things aren’t relevant to me or my life. It would be a waste of money for a company to pay to put those ads in front of me. I’m never going to buy Scott Turf Builder. I let the landlord worry about the lawn. Facebook and other social media sites allow advertisers to filter the people their ads are visible to based off their searches, likes, posts, tweets and comments. So when I login to Facebook I see ads for local New Orleans music performances, my beloved Saints (Who Dat!), sales at Anthropologie and discounts at Starbucks (yep, I’m that girl).
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What are your analytics saying about you?

Posted on January 25, 2011 by Renee

Response Rates – Advanced Tracking – Live Analytics

These words are music to a business owner’s ears while simultaneously capable of sending a chill down a marketer’s spine who has not yet merged it’s strategies with accountable marketing. Marketing campaigns have long been deemed successful based on the end-calculated results that surface at the close of a campaign. Did sales increase? If yes, then chalk it up as a success. If no, back to the drawing board. But with tracking now that allows visibility into the success of a campaign during the campaign’s life cycle marketing has gained a level of accountability that is bringing transparency to the forefront.

With tracking and analytics that can provide clients with accurate data, reporting and statistics while a campaign is active, there is no need to wait for results at the end to evaluate. You can market, monitor and make changes to improve a campaign’s results throughout the life of the outreach. Talk about a formula for epic success.

How do you judge if a campaign is successful? If I were to run a credit score of your past marketing campaigns what would you qualify to buy?

If you’re waiting for results at the end of your campaigns to evaluate success then you’re missing a big piece of your market opportunity.

There is ample information that can be collected in the time between deployment and redemption if your marketing is equipped with the right tracking capabilities. Customer behavior and insight is not going to surface in your end sales calculation, but it should not be disregarded. There are pieces of the story that are left to be told by customers who respond and drop off during the activation process and do not make it to final step, redemption.

Equipping your campaigns with tracking capabilities (I’m not just talking google analytics here) can bring in a wealth of information. Even though this info may not account for a recorded sale, if the lead is captured and cultivated during the decision making process then with some motivation…a sale is waiting. No one said this would be easy.

Here a few things you could be missing out on:

New Customer Data: See what new customers have entered the site from sharing capabilities if your campaigns.

Campaign Entry Points: Where are customers entering your site from?

Brand Awareness from Social Sharing: Based on your response and social activity you can see how your campaign message is being spread through your customers activity.

Customer Insight from Poll Feature: Evaluate customer insight and opinions from poll questions and target market customers based on their input and responses.

Customer Status: Identify where customers are dropping off during the activation process and reach out to encourage them to walk through to redemption.

Segment responding customers based on their activity, demographic or influence and respond based on who your customers are or what they are interested in.

Marketing campaigns equipped with tracking capabilities do not just provide sales results but fill case studies and reviews with customer data and insight. If you can run a campaign and gain information along the way to improve end results there’s no excuse for low response. Monitoring campaign’s and making adjustments or adding supporting outreaches to drive more response during a campaign allows marketers to take advantage of the actual users who show interestyet drop off in the funnel. Capturing leads, identifying their level of interest and pushing those who drop off back into the sales funnel drives more response, resulting in more customers, which ultimately leads to more sales.

What are your campaign analytics saying about you?

One Good Post Deserves Another – The Golden Rule and how it applies to social media in business

Posted on January 3, 2011 by Dominique

We all know the Golden Rule – do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I’m pretty sure it was posted on the bulletin board in about half my school classrooms growing up. And I’m even more certain that it was repeated to me in a tone of disappointment when I had gotten into yet another fight with one of my brothers. We were inundated with it growing up. So it baffles me when businesses fail to adhere to this time honored sage advice. It looks like I’m not alone in this sentiment either.

Last week Steve Olenski posted an article on Social Media Today about a recent frustration he had with a rather substantial business – American Girl. You know those incredibly popular dolls that come complete with books, movies, clothes, bedroom sets, matching clothes for their proud owners and even accessories (all sold separately, of course). If I’m not mistake the American Girl store in Chicago even has a cafe in it where mothers and daughters can spend an entire day shopping and dining all in the theme of their favorite doll. Impressive right?

So it’s only natural that this company should have a customer service department in place as well as at the very least, a Facebook page. Well when the doll he and his wife had ordered failed to arrive on time Steve called American Girl’s customer service hotline. He was told it was delivered to his local USPS office. Low and behold, with just a day or so left until Christmas morning, no such doll had arrived at the USPS. So Steve called again and was given the runaround. So, like any good social media professional, he took to their Facebook page.

Unfortunately the post was to no avail. It seems the last post the company had made to its own Facebook page was from many, many months before. How disappointing.
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The 2011 Marketing Strategy: Engage –> Motivate –> Reward

Posted on December 27, 2010 by Renee

There’s no better time to refocus and redefine goals and strategies than at the end of a year and start of a new one. New beginnings have a way with easing the growing pains of transition making them a bit more acceptable. Dukky has learned a lot in 2010, along with our customers. Each campaign provided us valuable data to better execute and equip resellers and clients with the tools that ensure success in each campaign.

I’m a big advocate of learning from other’s mistakes and successes in life. I do not need to have a first-hand experience to recognize the real value of the lesson from that experience. We try to keep this practice as a vital part of our business model in order to equip our clients and campaigns with their maximum potential by keeping track of the great, the good, and the not so fabulous. So, what did Dukky learn this past year? Take a gander.

The Lessons of 2010

1) We are reaching an interactive audience. Consumers are active and engaged. We saw a continuously increasing level of engagement from consumers across industries throughout various campaigns this year. Businesses that fostered their online life and presence and added sharing technologies to their outreaches saw an overall growth in numbers to lead generation, customer database, sales, and ROI. All by harnessing the power of their active audience.

2) Influencers are your greatest assets. Identifying the influencers in campaigns was not only a way to generate more leads but a way to build community and increase customer retention by placing value on those who are able to carry your message to their peers. This year our clients have not only identified their influencers but developed loyalty programs from their new list of valuable customers. By uniquely engaging and rewarding their influencers, it resulted in increased reach, customers, and conversion.

3) Cross channel marketing took on a whole new meaning with the ability to funnel all mediums into one portal (microsite) for enhanced tracking and analytics. Being able to watch consumers interact and engage with brands and offers has redefined the expectation of results for our clients. In successful outreaches and in the campaigns that did not succeed, it was the ability to see which mediums brought in customers and converted clicks to leads that was vital to planning future campaigns.

4) Analytics do not lie and businesses wanted the proof that their dollars turned into customers and sales. What do your numbers tell you about your campaigns, investments, and ROI? 2010 revealed the do’s and don’ts for our customers. Having access to analytics that covered campaign statistics, demographic information and breakdowns, poll results, sharing activity and lead list provided answers and results in real-time.

5) With the ability to engage consumers through various marketing outreaches (direct mail, email, digital, etc) and motivate them to action through offers and sweepstakes our clients learned a valuable lesson about rewarding the customer. Tell the consumer the value of your offer and what they need to do to get it. When they engage….respond back. Reward them for sharing the offer or being an influencer, thank them for participating in the campaign, remind them to come in-store to redeem the offer, etc. Campaigns that were successful from start to finish did not just start off strong but the marketers were active throughout the life of the campaign, taking a proactive approach to fostering the leads that were generated.

At the end of 2011, we want to fill our review with endless success stories from our resellers and large and small business clients. To start your year off right here are few more tips to take with you into 2011.

Customer retention is just as important as lead generation.
Don’t be afraid of viral campaigns. When your customers multiply your sales increase with it.
Keep your marketing consistent across channels. Don’t separate direct mail, email, and digital into different departments and strategies. It’s one marketing message with multiple channels to drive customers to the same place.
Above all else engage and interact with your customers.
If it isn’t working, change it.

Here’s to starting off 2011 with the tips and tools to taste success from the beginning!

Why can’t we be friends?

Posted on December 22, 2010 by Dominique

Here are some shocking stats for you:

Five of the top 50 global brands have either no or a virtually nonexistent Facebook presence. Marlboro, Goldman Sachs, HSBC and Siemen’s, that is.” And Apple, one of the most admired global brands, does not have an official Facebook presence?
Budweiser is the only one of the top 50 global brands to direct users to an “unfiltered” Facebook wall. That means that the other 44 are actively limiting what consumers can see on their pages.
89 percent of consumer replies on company’s Facebook pages remained unanswered. Case in point: Gucci didn’t reply to a single thread in the last three months. Eleven companies, meanwhile, responded to more than just one consumer.

If you’re a social media marketing professional then you probably had the same reaction to these statements from a recent article from Forbes.com that I did. And that reaction was “What the #@*?!”

Much to my horror, the article says that some of the world’s biggest brands, with thousands of dollars at their disposal, simply don’t get the value of social media marketing, namely Facebook. The article states that five of the top 45 companies on Interbrand’s list of the Best Global Brands had no Facebook presence and seven others—namely Disney, Gucci, McDonald’s, Louis Vuitton, American Express and Sony—allow only for “company-initiated conversations,” meaning consumers can read, but not chime in the dialogue.

That last part is what got to me the most. How can you not allow for a conversation with your customers? Isn’t that what social media marketing is all about? Well it seems that a lot of these companies either lack the 24/7 resources needed to manage a corporate social media presence (cause we all know that social media never sleeps) or they subscribe to the old guard mantras of marketing. And that old mantra is to keep the power. One of the contributors to the study the article talks about explains – “Most of these marketers were raised with the goal of owning the consumer…but with social media, the objective is not to own the consumer, but to be their friend.” To this sentiment I’d like to borrow some time honored words from War and ask “Why can’t we be friends?”
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A Social Media Professional’s Guide to Surviving the Holidays

Posted on December 20, 2010 by Renee

Christmas is just a few days away and with a only a handful of holiday parties to attend down and still about five more to go the winning question so far this year has been “How’s your job going? I see you posting things about Dukky…what exactly is that and what do you do?” Depending on who’s asking usually determines how I can actually respond. Aunt Mary loves me but has no idea what viral sharing means or even understands what a marketing SaaS is, nor does she really care. Her involvement in social sites is solely based on connecting with others and staying in touch with old friends.

And thus, the social media professional’s dilemma arises. When you love your new Christmas present and immediately want to instagram a picture of it or feel it necessary to immediately tweet Uncle John’s outlandish holiday declaration to your social networks it’s likely that some of the family just won’t get it. How can you avoid being labeled rude and withdrawn when really you are just maintaining a high (or normal to you) level of connectivity? Continue reading →