A number of recent conversations with clients and CMO friends have centered on what to try next in B2B marketing. The conversations have gone something like this:
“I’ve cut back PR because I just couldn’t justify the retainer. Our traditional media buys are much smaller this year because the economy sucks. We’re doing our one essential trade show this year and have killed the rest. We’re tweeting and have about 500 followers. Most of my prospects and customers aren’t on Twitter. Our Facebook page has 250 friends but they are mostly employees, vendors and a small group of customers. Despite alot of knob turning, our paid and organic search has reached a plateau. And my sales team is complaining about the quality of the webinar and whitepaper leads… What can I do?”
Here are two cutting edge things that I have seen more progressive marketers testing:
Social media lead generation – I know this may be heretical but try using social media to actively engage people. People are using one of the social media monitoring tools like Radian6, Scoutlabs or Trackur. The obvious rules of social media apply (ie don’t be an idiot, be considerate, join the conversation, etc).
Online Content Syndication – There are about 10-20 social media sites that have any traffic and really matter to the average B2B company. Once you establish your presence on these sites, you can use tools like PingFM and Tubemogul as well as RSS feeds to push content. The idea is to use tags based on your most important SEO keywords. Again, I know this isn’t “joining the conversation” so you need to be actively monitoring things to participate and engage prospects.
Can you suggest any others that I have missed?
Also, for those of you didn’t get the 80′s one hit wonder reference in the post headline, here is the video for the song by the bad Haircut 100. Enjoy and stay tangy.
haircut 100 forever!
I think it is interesting that Google served contextual ads for hair coloring and salons over the video. I’d post an image here if I could.