7 Useful Tips From Real B2B Brands On Using Social Media To Drive Sales

1. Create a library of resources and internal success stories.

Almost every B2B brand has dedicated sales people – but the challenge most organizations face is how to properly engage these sales people through social media. Christine Talcott, VP of ES Global Sales at ADP shared a brilliant case study of some of the useful resources that they offer to sales staff to enable them to more effectively do their jobs. They use everything from videos and training to internal case studies of “converted” sales people who talk about how much of an impact social media has had on their selling. The result is a strong pipeline of positive examples, as well as a ready toolkit for sales people to draw upon.
Popout

2. Get smarter about content creation.

In one of the most powerful case studies of the day, Michelle Wickum, Director of Marketing from Steelmaster shared a story of how her pre-fabricated steel structure manufacturer was struggling with a 49% decrease in lead volume and 39% sales decline. She worked to adopt a more content-centric strategy and used that content to answer key customer questions and grow engagement. In her industry and category, this was a strategy no other competitor was using … which allowed Steelmaster to dramatically grow its share of voice. Ultimately, the combination of her content and focus on social media helped result in a 92% increase in lead volume and 79% increase in sales revenue. When asked how much social media actually contributed to that figure, and whether she was able to measure that impact, she shared that she was, and between 30% and 40% of the turnaround could be attributed DIRECTLY to social media.

3. Foster internal creators first.

Your people are your best spokespeople. For all the times that we hear this wonderfully cliched piece of advice, how many companies actually manage to find a great way to inspire those people to talk about your business. In a session later in the day, marketing manager Annie Cull from Calvert Investments shared how her internal program to foster and develop what she termed “SMACs” (Social Media Approved Contributors) led to a strong and engaged group of employee ambassadors. In the same session, Matt Anchin from Nielsen spoke about how his organization has build a speaker’s bureau of more than 350 experts who can speak about Nielsen research … and now that group is increasingly turning to social media as a way to share their insights in between speaking gigs.

4. Let the doers try (and sometimes fail).

Control is a topic that nearly always comes up at any social media event – and when you consider operating a brand on a global basis, the issue is one that most large brand teams have struggled with at some point. The usual response is to create some sort of centralized guidelines for best practices, and perhaps even some kind of “center of excellence.” Tanya Donnelly, Global Social Media Director of Schneider Electric shared a somewhat different strategy. Instead of sucking employee ambition and passion with crippling guidelines, she encourages some amount of experimentation with highly visible metrics. In other words, she lets people try new things, but makes their failure or success highly visible. As a result, there is an incentive for smart experimentation with a strong strategy, and a disincentive to take unfounded risks.

5. Make collaboration the priority.

In a sneak preview of a presentation he will deliver next week at the Pivot conference, 3M Social Media Leader Greg T. Gerik showcased some very interesting innovations at 3M that are all focused on fostering more collaboration for multiple business reasons. One reason, of course, is to inspire better research and more innovation. There were plenty of applications for social selling and insights gathering as well. Below are several screens from this new tool, which includes online automated sentiment analysis, and even real life installations of touch screens in the main 3M office to encourage more virtual collaboration across sllos.

6. Listen to and act on customer suggestions.

The owner of Quickbooks and TurboTax was one of several brands that has both a B2B AND a B2C operation. As a result, they have the unique chance to take lessons from what works in one situation and apply another. For Intuit, as Sherry Ramatian discussed, this means taking reviews from customers and using them to shift opinions and inform potential customers prior to a sale. In addition, when customers have suggestions for improvements, Intuit works hard to not only listen, but also share any results that may come from those suggestions.

7. Build relationships before you need them.

An often repeated stat from multiple presenters throughout the day was that 60% of all B2B sales purchase decisions are made based on the pre-sales cycle. In other words, more than half of the purchase decision is already made before your prospect even lets you know they are interested. To account for this fact, Gerry Moran, Social Media Marketing Director from SAP shared several stories of how his organization builds relationships with potential clients through showcasing customer stories and creating and sharing content of value. The goal, as Gerry shared, is to “shift from focusing on lead generation” to “demand generation.” The end result is that when a customer is finally ready to consider a new solution – SAP is at the top of the short list.*

Why You (Yes, YOU) Need to Create More Landing Pages

220
inShare

 

"Who, me? More landing pages, you say? But I've already got some of those floating around my website." Sure ... BUT WHERE ALL THE LEADS AT?!
Several months back, I wrote an article about why landing pages are an indispensable part of marketing. And for all you marketers out there who have been going inbound for a while, you probably 'get' why they're important. But are you creating enough of them to really scale your lead generation efforts? For many of you, probably not. Let's find out why -- at least in the case of landing pages -- more is better.

Why You Need More Landing Pages

First, I'm going to throw some brand spankin' new data at you, straight from our Marketing Benchmarks From 7,000 Businesses report, which you can download in full here for free. Just have a look-see at the graph below:



While most companies don't see an increase in leads when increasing their total number of landing pages from 1-5 to 6-10, companies do see a 55% increase in leads when increasing their number of landing pages from 10 to 15. And look how that leads index number spikes even more when a company has 40 or more landing pages on their website. And here's how it breaks down for B2B and B2C businesses:



While both B2B and B2C companies seem to benefit from having more landing pages, it seems to be even more advantageous for B2Bs to hit that 40 landing page threshold.
As you can see, it's hard to deny there's a pretty strong correlation between the number of landing pages you have on your website and lead generation. But why is this so? Here are four good explanations why the more landing pages, the better your leads number.

1) More Landing Pages Means More Conversion Opportunities

Quite simply, the more landing pages you have on your website, the more opportunities you have to convert site visitors into leads. There's also a huge SEO benefit to having more landing pages, which can have an impact even before visitors land on your website. Think about it: The more landing pages you have, the more landing pages will be indexed in search. And if a searcher stumbles upon a search result that directs them straight to one of your landing pages, you'll have essentially cut out the extra step of a visitor perusing your site and needing to click on a call-to-action to get to that same landing page. In other words, the pathway from discovery to conversion has much less friction. And do you know what happens when there's less friction? You generate more leads.

2) More Landing Pages Means More Variety

You've all heard that saying, "variety is the spice of life," right? Yep -- it applies to marketing, too. Consider it from your visitors' perspective. Say you're visiting a business' website, and you surf on over to its "Resources" section (you know, where a business might organize all its offers and their respective landing pages). Now let's also say that "Resources" page only features 5 -- or even 10, according to the research cited above -- offers because, well, those are the only offers this particular business has available. And maybe none of those offers really appeal to you, because well ... there's just not enough variety. So you go on your web browsing way, abandoning the site without converting on anything. And hey, the same thing will happen if that business only has CTAs for a few offers placed throughout your website or promoted via their other marketing channels. If none of them tickle your fancy as a visitor, you're probably not going to convert.
In a nutshell, don't let this happen to you. Creating more landing pages means you'll have a wider variety of offers for your visitors to convert on and for you to promote, which leads us to reason number three ...

3) More Landing Pages Means More Marketing Collateral

The more landing pages you have, the more offers you'll have to fuel the rest of your inbound marketing efforts. Remember, content is the heart and soul of any successful inbound marketing strategy. Without it, you'd have nothing to email your contacts, nothing to share with your social media fans and followers, nothing to promote through your website calls-to-action, nothing by which to get found and rank for your keywords in search. The more offers -- and landing pages to house those offers -- you have, the more (and more effective) inbound marketing you can do. And because reason number two (variety) is also a big factor in this, the more landing pages you have, the more prospects you'll be able to capture as leads for your business.

4) More Landing Pages Means More Targeting Opportunities

Segmentation matters -- and not just when it comes to email marketing. But when you identify various different buyer personas and segments within your audience, you have the opportunity to better appeal to those different audiences' interests and needs with more targeted and relevant offers. And to leverage this savvy thinking, face it: You need more landing pages. So what naturally ends up happening for marketers who build up a big arsenal of 40+ landing pages, is they start to create more segment-specific content that, because it's highly relevant to different parts of their audience, is much better able to convert visitors into leads.

How to Increase the Number of Landing Pages on Your Site

"I get it, I get it: More landing pages is better. But how can I go about cranking out more of those bad boys?" So glad you asked!

1) Invest in a Landing Page Creation Tool (And Control Over Your Website)

Let's address one of marketers' biggest landing page creation roadblocks first. According to MarketingSherpa's Landing Page Handbook (2nd edition), the number one reason businesses don't use landing pages is because their marketing department doesn't know how to set them up, or they are too overloaded. If you're nodding your head in agreement, you absolutely positively need to invest in a tool that enables you to quickly and easily create optimized landing pages. This involves taking control of your website, so if it takes you weeks to get a landing page created (or even just edited) because you have to go through some third party resource like a webmaster to make changes for you, put an end to that as soon as possible. Inbound marketing requires agility, and you'll never become an agile marketer if you're dependent on someone else to get things done for you. Plus, I hear HubSpot has a pretty sweet and easy-to-use Landing Page tool (*wink wink*).

2) Create More Offers

I'm just gonna give it to you straight. You can't just go around slapping together a ton of new landing pages, no matter how motivated you are to reap those "more is better" results. You're going to need offers (and good ones, at that) to go along with them. Keep in mind that landing pages are simply the gateways for your marketing offers, so in order to increase your site's number of landing pages, you need to increase offer creation, too. And don't get me wrong, this is going to take you some time and effort, but it's also absolutely necessary if you want larger gains in lead generation.
Before you start creating new offers, take a look at the offers you already have, and identify where you might have some holes. Do you have offers to suit prospects at each different stage in your marketing and sales funnel? Do you have offers in a variety of different formats (e.g. webinars vs. ebooks vs. templates vs. videos, etc.)? Do they cover various different topics your target audience cares about? Once you've identified what your holes are, then you can start filling in the gaps. To learn more about offer creation, check out this blog post about how to create marketing offers that don't fall flat.

3) Tweak the Offers You Already Have to Cater to Individual Personas

Okay -- so you're going to have to create a bunch more offers to leverage the lead-gen power of an increase in landing pages. But here's a little saving grace: not all of these offers need to be created from scratch. In fact, if you already have a few general offers on your hands but also know that you have a few different buyer personas that you market to, one great way to increase your number of offers (and as a result, landing pages) is to tweak your existing offers to cater to each of your different personas. As you're doing this, reposition the content and create a landing page that caters to that persona's individual needs, problems, and interests; adjust the offer's formatting, depth, and length; modify language and tone; and incorporate industry/persona-specific examples -- all of which we elaborate on in this very post about how to tailor offer content to suit individual personas.
And once you have a variety of persona-specific marketing offers, then you can segment your prospects by persona and nurture them with the right offers through tools like email marketing, or dynamic CTAs on your various web pages.

4) Repurpose Content You Already Have

While we're on the topic of tweaking existing content, don't overlook the fact that there are a lot of different ways to create new offers using content you already have, saving you the time and effort of building a brand new offer from the ground up. Some great offer ideas pulled from our article, "The Time-Crunched Marketer's Guide to Creating Lead-Gen Offers" include creating a blog bundle by pulling together a compilation of your best blog posts around a given topic, making a data compilation of interesting industry research and data you've already collected, turning an educational PPT presentation you've given into a downloadable PDF or a live webinar, recording an interview, creating an FAQ-driven ebook, etc.

12 Great Places That Your Business Should be Collecting Online Reviews

 So here's a list of 12 great places that your business should be collecting online reviews...

 

Angie's List

Geared toward service-based businesses, Angie's List is a "higher end" review site, because users actually have to pay for membership. But you get what you pay for, because the reviews, given on an A-F scale, are typically very well-thought out -- not a lot of that ranting and raving that's more common on free review sites. The reviews cannot be anonymous, which helps cut down on fake or misrepresentative reviews, and companies are allowed to respond to the reviews posted about them, too. Set up a free account with them, and then encourage your customers who are on Angie's List to leave reviews there ... because members are the only ones allowed to do it!

Yelp!

Yelp! is a free review site that lets consumers rate businesses on a 5-star scale. Any business can set up a profile on Yelp! for free, and any user can set up their own free profile to review a business. You're free to respond to reviewers, too, but I recommend taking a balanced and polite approach to any negative reviews you receive, as Yelpers are in a pretty tight-knit community.
Yelp! has also come under fire over the past four years for some slightly shady practices, like incentivizing businesses to advertise with them in exchange for gaming the search results for their business ("pay us money and we'll push bad reviews down!"), so savvier consumers have learned to look at Yelp! reviews as a whole and with the reviewer's clout in mind, instead of getting turned off by a business because of one bad listing. That being said, it's still to your benefit to get a constant stream of positive online reviews coming to your business' Yelp! account so happy customers are always at the top of your review feed, especially is you're a location-based business; Yelp! profile information contains things like store hours and location information, so your profile will often turn up when people Google your business.

Google Reviews/Local/Places/+

You may know it as Google Local. Or Google Places. Maybe you just call it Google Reviews. Or, if you're ridiculously up to date on Google's bevies of updates, you might know it as its current name, Google+ 'Local.' But those reviews that show up when you conduct a Google search for a business? Yeah, those things, are on this list in a big way.
If you have a page under Google+ Local, anyone can leave a review for your business. Because Google+ has resulted in a lot of changes to the way Google's search results look, here's a screenshot of what you'd see if you searched for your business in Google's search engine, the location of your Google reviews called out in the orange box:



Sometimes the reviews may be featured in the main search results, too, and not to the right as you see here.
If you click into "Read more info," you'll go to the 'Local' tab of the business' Google+ Page, where more reviews can be seen and posted. Because this is a restaurant, you also see Zagat review information here ... that's obviously only relevant for, well, restaurants. You may also notice a score next to your business. Here's a handy little guide to just what those numbers mean:

Yahoo! Local Listings

Similar to Google+ Local reviews, Yahoo! Local reviews let users post reviews of businesses with a 5-star rating system. Here's what the results might look like:



According to The Marketing Zen Group, Yahoo! still receives about 13.5% of search engine share. So while you might not want to invest time figuring out the intricacies of Yahoo!'s algorithm, obtaining some favorable reviews on the Yahoo! Local Listings sure couldn't hurt for that 13.5%!

Insider Pages

Another local, user-generated review site, Insider Pages, lets anyone share reviews of local businesses for free. They've been at it since 2004, so they've amassed millions of viewers over the years -- plus their results get indexed in the SERPs. That is to say that even if your target audience isn't using Insider Pages to find and compare businesses, they may still stumble upon an Insider Pages review in the SERPs. Their reviews also work off of a 5-star rating system.

Citysearch

Incredibly similar to Insider Pages, Citysearch is a free, user-generated local review site that, again, operates via a 5-star rating system. While people may navigate to their local Citysearch site to check out your reviews and compare you with competitors, it's more likely a Citysearch review will pop up in a searcher's results in the SERPs. It'd look something like this:

Consumer Search

Consumer Search also provides reviews and reports of products on a 5-star rating scale, but their approach to the process is pretty interesting. Instead of growing their own user base, they take reviews from the internet and print publications, analyze the reviews and the sources, and rank them for credibility. People can then come to the site to search for products and get a distillation of all the opinions floating around in the world on those products. They state that they "have the most respect for reviews that cover multiple competing products -- and when a reviewer can demonstrate testing. We also listen carefully to a reviewer who has tested many products, and then makes an assertion that the product he is reviewing today beats other products he has reviewed in the past." That seems to be a general way of telling us they don't listen to the rants and raves of lunatics, but rather consider the quality of the reviewer in their assessment. Other criteria they consider are:

• How up-to-date the review is
• How credible the reviewer's top picks are in relation to the top picks of other reviewers
• The reviewer's expertise
• How extensive and convincing the reviewer's methodological approach is compared to other reviewer's

Wicked Legit Review Sites

Then, there are some review sites that go beyond your average online review site, because of the amount of clout their names carry. Here are two sites you should consider establishing a great reputation with -- particularly if you're a service-based business, B2B, or your product or service carries a high asking price.

Consumer Reports

A nonprofit organization, consumerreports.org is an independent product testing organization that tests, rates, and recommends products based off their unbiased testing of those products. They have 7 million subscribers, accept no advertising, and pay for all products that they test. This is about as legitimate as it gets. As such, there's not much you can do here except, if you sell a product, make sure it's really, really good.
If nothing else, you could take this website as a lesson in excellent content creation. For each product they review, they provide the review criteria, product overviews, a buying guide, social sharing buttons -- it's all quite comprehensive and, well, helpful. Pretty much the key to great content, am I right?

Better Business Bureau (BBB)

Another nonprofit site, the BBB evaluates all types of businesses against a set of best practices for how businesses should treat the public. They don't directly recommend or endorse any businesses, products, or services; they simply provide the public with the information on their site about businesses, and whether they have met the BBB's accreditation standards. They will also review both accredited and non-accredited businesses.



As you can see, a business' profile listing on the BBB contains general overview information, like a short company bio and the company's accreditation status, a history of any complaints made about the business and whether they were resolved, customer reviews, and the BBB's A-F rating of the business.

Properties You Control(ish)

Online reviews exist on sites that aren't necessarily built just to publish online reviews. Some businesses use their social presence and website to encourage online reviews ... and some brands just get them unsolicited, for better or for worse. Here are some sites that, if you choose to (please, choose to) can serve as additional hubs for online reviews. And they're awesome, because they have enormous reach, and you have some -- if not entire -- control over these properties!

Facebook

Did you know there's a place on Facebook for fans to leave recommendations of your business? There sure is ... it's named, aptly, Facebook Recommendations. It'll show up if you're viewing your timeline as 'Highlights' (you can change that under your cover photo if you're not):



Then you should see a box with recommendations on your Timeline -- though it's incredibly easy to breeze past is if you have an active Timeline. I mean, the recommendations kind of just look like any ol' post.



Actually, that's really what your entire Timeline is -- a bunch of reviews of your business. So if your Facebook Recommendations section isn't exactly hopping, that's alright. Just don't forget that your entire Facebook presence is a living, breathing recommendation engine every time someone posts on your wall or comments on your content!

LinkedIn

You might know about the LinkedIn recommendation feature that lets one individual leave a recommendation for another -- that's good for your own personal marketing, no doubt. But businesses have some recourse of their own to gather reviews of their performance! When you visit a company page on LinkedIn, you should see a 'Products and Services' box in the right navigation. If you click into it, you'll see a company's user-generated reviews of that product or service! What's really cool is, not only can you have your product or service reviewed, but you can also get reviews of your content assets -- notice the last review in the preview below recommends one of our free ebooks, How to Generate Leads Using LinkedIn!

Twitter

The ridiculously fast-paced nature of Twitter makes it seem like a weird place to try to accumulate reviews. But while users might not search for reviews on Twitter (unless you started some kind of review hashtag, perhaps), tweets are still indexed in search results. That means a user's tweet, whether complimentary or less-than, could pop up in the SERPs when someone's searching for reviews on your business.
Not only that -- there's things you can actively do with the positive tweets coming at you! For instance, recently at HubSpot we tested the element of social proof on conversions, attaching three tweets that gave positive reviews on an ebook we were promoting. Guess what happened? The CTA with the three tweets converted better than the CTA with no tweets! If you start to 'Favorite' tweets that could serve as positive reviews in the future, you just might find a place to reference or embed them that could come in handy in your marketing.

Your Website

Finally, the one place where you have total and utter control -- your website is an excellent place to publicize reviews you receive (perhaps embed some of those tweets you favorited?) You could carve out a section of your website dedicated just to reviews and testimonials, and even include a form so happy customers can submit their reviews unsolicited. But if you're actively campaigning for positive online reviews and you encounter happy customers that want to leave you a positive review, but don't have accounts on sites like Yelp!, Angie's List, LinkedIn, or Google, it's handy to have a place on your website to publish their kind words. Consider adding testimonials to landing pages and product pages, too!

Don't Forget to Subscribe to my BLOG!

Facebook Launches Global Pages to Simplify Brands' International Facebook Presence

Are you a global business that sells to customers on an international scale? Have you struggled with the agonizing question of whether to set up multiple social media accounts on each social network to better support your various marketing initiatives geared toward different international markets? Well as it turns out, Facebook feels your pain.
Yesterday, Facebook announced the launch of Global Pages, a new structure to business pages for global brands aimed to provide a better, localized experience for international brands' prospects and customers. The new structure consolidates a business' global Facebook presence into one place while still providing a localized experience.

How Facebook's New Global Structure Works

The idea is, rather than a global brand maintaining one general, broadly targeted Facebook page -- or juggling multiple Facebook Pages set up for each different international market -- that brand can instead maintain and promote one centralized Facebook Page URL. Visitors to that page will then get routed to the most appropriate version of a page based on their home country, where they will see a localized version of the page, which the administrator can customize to include different cover photos, profile photos, applications, milestones, 'About' information, and news feed stories.
The global marketer can set up their Global Pages structure to create localized pages for the specific markets (i.e. single or multicountry regions) they're targeting. They can also set up a default page that all other users outside of these specific markets get directed to. If you're familiar with LinkedIn's targeted Product and Services Page variations within their Company Pages, Facebook is implementing a similar idea: Users get redirected to the version of the page that's best suited for them based on their geographic location.



Okay -- so what's the difference between a global marketer just setting up and customizing different Facebook Pages? In one word: centralization.

3 Key Benefits of Global Pages

1. A Centralized Facebook Presence: No matter which version of the page a visitor gets routed to, all visitors will see the same page name (translated into their local language), fan count, and 'People Talking About This' counts.
2. A Single URL: Rather than having to promote a different page URL for each localized page, global brands will be able to promote one single URL in all of their marketing efforts to promote their Facebook presence, since page visitors will be automatically be redirected to the appropriate version of the Page based on their goegraphic information.
3. A Centralized Global Insights Dashboard: Rather than having to check the Facebook Insights for multiple pages, administrators of the main Global Page will be able to check Insights for all page variations in one centralized dashboard.

But What if I Already Have Multiple Pages Set Up?

It's easy to see how this new feature can help global social media marketers who already manage one general page, eliminating the pain of geo-targeting every status update and page post -- but what about the marketers who have already set up completely separate, country-specific Facebook Pages for each of their target international markets?
According to Facebook, it is possible for admins of multiple pages to transition to the new Global Pages structure, citing examples such as the global Walt Disney Studios team working on Frankenweenie, who were easily able to migrate their country-specific pages for France, Ireland, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States to the Global Pages framework. Other brands, including the Holiday Inn and the Kit Kat team from Nestle have also successfully transitioned their various localized pages from regions around the globe to the new structure.
And that's not all ...

Facebook Also Promises Improved Global Benchmarking Data in the Future

Within Facebook's announcement, the social network also mentioned they're working on ways to make it easier for global marketers to measure their specific, localized audiences in each country -- which will include country-level fan counts for both Global Pages as well as pages not yet transitioned to the new framework (coming later this year in its public API).
In addition, Facebook is working to provide a way for marketers to benchmark their brand against competitors, enabling global marketers to measure and analyze how each localized market is performing and compare that data on a country-specific level with other Facebook pages via Facebook's API.

Great News for International Marketers

This seems like a no-brainer for businesses who cater to a global audience. No more agonizing over whether to divide their Facebook presence in order to appropriately cater their content and updates to their inidividual, localized segments of their audience. No more time spent fiddling with geo-targeting every single status update. No more splitting up the overall reach and impact of their Facebook presence.
To get started with Global Pages, Facebook indicates you'll need to get in touch with your Facebook client partner or account manager to discuss. If you're not already working with Facebook, you can contact Facebook marketing solutions here.
To learn more about how to effectively implement a global social media marketing strategy, download the free ebook, The Complete Guide to Global Social Media Marketing.