blog

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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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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What marketing functions are you outsourcing?

The latest data from MarketingSherpa suggests that many companies are planning to outsource more of their marketing functions. Even with much of marketing’s capabilities remaining in-house, the advantages of outsourcing — for scale or capabilities — are starting to be noticed.

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Pushing for top placement in search results is as old as marketing itself, and it continues to be a priority. Internet marketers continue to recognize the importance of search in driving the end user’s internet browsing experience and understand that the odds of attracting a visitor (and the opportunity to convert) improve significantly with search engine placement.

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As expected, social media marketing results vary across the B2B space. The general theme, according to the latest study by MarketingSherpa, is that, in general, social media marketing has been somewhat effective. What’s most encouraging, though, is that for most categories, few respondents indicated that social media initiatives were not effective at all.

For brand-related, traffic and PR efforts, more than 40 percent of respondents for each category indicated that there social media marketing programs were very effective, with those indicating “somewhat effective” ranging from 47 percent to 54 percent. Respondents saying that social media had not been effective for them amounted to 5 percent and fewer.

In areas where a connection to the sales cycle was included, social media was not deemed to have been as effective. Customer support quality and cost initiatives were generally somewhat effective to ineffective. Social media-driven lead generation, sales revenue and the containment of new customer acquisition costs, on the other hand, were generally somewhat effective.

[Source: MarketingSherpa]