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It is not about what you “can’t” do… it’s about what you can do. This may seem so simple and fundamental, but it is lost everyday.

Examples in retail and food service many of us come across: Why “can’t” you put Muenster on that burger if you have it in the back? Why “can’t” you take back a never worn shirt with a ripped seam? Why “can’t” you work a certain feature into the price if you provide it? Who wants to hear, “No, we don’t have that in stock.” Why “can’t” you make your customer happy? Typically, because of a policy that is outdated and nonsense.

Internally at enter:marketing, I am actively involved with operations, and I’m in close contact with customer service and sales representatives from various parts of the country. I hear “No” constantly. I hear “Sorry, we can’t do that for you.” What a turnoff! The result from hearing “No” turns me on to their more accommodating competitors, or results in cancelling orders. At enter:marketing, we rarely, if ever, tell our customers, “No, we cannot do that.” We adapt to your needs. Our company develops unique marketing campaigns tailored to the requests of our client. Instead of “No” , we like to think “Let’s see what we CAN do.” Read the rest of this entry »

In some industries, the corporate blogging and social media marketing opportunity is obvious. Especially in the consumer space, you use a corporate blog to attract, retain and engage your target market, ultimately with the goal of leading them into your sales funnel and converting on your website. For business-to-business companies, especially in the professional services sector, the case isn’t quite as clear.

Does a corporate blog become relegated to PR tool, or is it primarily a brand play?

With only soft metrics apparently available, it can be incredibly difficult to get even the slightest investment. Startup costs may be low, but content creation and traffic analysis tend to be time-consuming if done properly, making a soft-dollar employee commitment crucial … which is where the reluctance of senior management usually comes into play. To free up resources to tend to your corporate blog and manage your social media marketing environment, you need to deliver a compelling business case, showing explicitly the tangible benefits to your company.

Though B2B professional services companies are extremely likely to generate direct sales online, there is a salient ROI opportunity from this form of marketing, and it stretches well past branding and publicity. Let’s take a look at five ways you can use your B2B corporate blog to gain a competitive advantage:

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Do you actively manage how your company communicates to the market? Every interaction with your clients and prospects should be framed by what your company is and believes, and this includes every piece of paper and every conversation. Managing this may seem difficult, but with a rigorous approach, you can create a culture of message discipline in your company that will bolster your band, shorten the sales cycle and reduce selling costs. This leads to more revenue, higher margins and increased market share.

Ready to get started? Here’s how you can implement message discipline in five simple steps:

1. Define your message: without a clear message from the start, nothing else matters. Your brand is a random collection of public statements and project results that may or may not be related to each other. Take the time to decide what your company is and means, based on your core business objectives and competencies. Document it, and be prepared to live by it.

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As you increase your visibility, it becomes more important to manage what you say in public. The people who watch your company most carefully – namely, existing and potential clients – will be more likely to pick up on discrepancies, invariably leading to the uncomfortable conversations you want to avoid. It’s a necessary evil as you grow your brand and your company, so instead of trying to avoid it, start implementing message discipline now. For small and mid-sized B2B service providers, this is crucial.

The purpose of brand marketing is to define your company and communicate this to the marketplace, creating a platform for future growth at a lower cost per sale. You want your company to be visible, to be on the minds of prospective buyers all the time. There are many ways to accomplish this, ranging from person-to-person interaction through broad PR and social media initiatives. Even your demand generation campaigns are part of this process: over time, direct response marketing can accumulate to brand recognition (as long as you are positioning your marketing materials correctly).

So, what happens when it works?

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Small and mid-sized IT solution providers understand the value of leads. Without a full and steady pipeline, it’s easy to get nervous about the future. And with relatively tight marketing budgets, tough decisions are often necessary, and the focus naturally turns to demand generation over other important marketing initiatives, such as solidifying your brand.

What you may not realize, however, is that an investment in your brand is also an investment in shorter sales cycles, deeper client relationships and repeat business that comes at a lower cost than new client acquisition. Frankly, it pays to invest some of your marketing budget in branding, even if it comes at the expense of some lead generation.

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The use of social media to market a company is usually linked to brand initiatives first, despite obvious application for lead generation and cultivation. It makes sense, though. The brand propagation uses of social media are straightforward and can be incredibly powerful.

The latest research from MarketingSherpa shows that the three most effective uses of social media are: influence brand reputation, increase brand awareness and improve search engine rankings, with respondents saying they’re “very effective” coming in at 39 percent, 37 percent and 38 percent, respectively. Respondents indicating that social media is “somewhat effective” for achieving these branding goals are 53 percent, 54 percent and 49 percent, respectively.

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Most companies could be much more aggressive with their e-mail marketing initiatives. A new report from MarketingSherpa shows that customer retention is by far the top priority, with objectives around new opportunities not gaining nearly as much attention. Listen to this message from the market, and you’ll hear the whisper: “It’s time to make your move.”

When I saw the latest chart published by MarketingSherpa, I was shocked. Eighty-eight percent of respondents called “retain[ing] existing customers” a very important objective for e-mail marketing. Only 78 percent ascribed this level of importance to “generat[ing] new sales leads,” and “increase web traffic,” “build brand and educate market” and “drive offline sales” each was considered “very important” by only 56 percent of respondents.

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As you begin to enter the social media marketing space, you’ll start to hear about “fans,” “friends” and “followers” — variations on the connections that people make in these environments. These relationships provide a first layer of measurement for social media marketing success, as they define your primary high-value audience.

While you don’t want to evaluate success strictly in terms of the number of followers or fans you amass — their activity, particularly relative to blog pageviews or, even better, purchases is far more important — this is the foundation from which you will drive the interactions that yield returns.

So, why do customers and clients become company and brand fans? Well, the answer varies with the type of social media user involved.

According to MarketingSherpa, there are three basic categories: Daily Users, Max Connectors and everyone else (i.e., “All Respondents”). Max Connectors are users with more than 500 social connections (e.g., on Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter). Daily Users are exactly what you think they are, though they lack the number of relationships as Max Connectors. Finally, All Respondents consists of Max Connectors, Daily Users and everyone else who participated in the study.

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IT manufacturers and resellers have been looking into social media marketing, unsure of whether there’s an ROI case in it but understanding that eventually they’ll need to make the plunge. Well, an announcement by Dell yesterday shows that you should explore social media marketing … for all the right reasons.

Dell says that it has generated more than $6.5 million in sales via Twitter alone. The company’s broader social media presence – which includes Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube – has more than 3 million members, according to Manish Mehta, vice president of social media and community for Dell.

Let’s be realistic: $6.5 million is a drop in the bucket for Dell. At the same time, social media is but one part of its overall marketing strategy. So, it looks as though the return Dell has generated is at least close to proportional.

So, we should all rush over to Twitter and get started, right?

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There are two reasons to enter the social media marketing space: to protect your brand and market share and to go out and grab more. How many reasons are there to avoid this marketing venue? None.

The ubiquity of social media means that you have to enter the space. IT manufacturers and resellers are already experimenting with blogs, LinkedIn profiles and Twitter feeds – some have already made them marketing priorities. Their reasons for doing so vary, however.

For the cautious, blogs and other social media tools are defensive. They provide a way to protect the company brand and keep competitors from rushing to claim the high ground online. By maintaining a social media presence, including regular and consistent blog-based communication, they are able to prevent other technology companies from reaching out to their clients. This protective approach doesn’t generate a powerful ROI case it does help prevent revenue from leaking to the competition.

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