Wednesday 30 March 2011

Learn how to create a successful B2B Facebook page.

Dell B2B Facebook Pages from Jeffrey L. Cohen on Vimeo.

After the success of Dell's Social Media for Business Facebook page, which now has over 48,000 fans, SocialMediaB2B.com spoke with Laura Thomas, Senior Consultant of Digital Media at Dell, about the company's Facebook presence and how it relates to its B2B customers.

This video is well worth taking 5 minutes if you are currently deciding whether Facebook is the right way to go for your B2B business.

What I like best is that Laura get's out of jargon founded idea of "B2B" and remembers that business to business customers are still people, just the same as "Business to Consumer" customers.

Monday 28 March 2011

How to Use Linkedin to win new business: poll results

Ian Brodie, LinkedIn expert has carried out some interesting research to find out ‘How people were using LinkedIn to win new business’.

There are plenty of theories for what you need to do, top ten tips for improving your LinkedIn profile etc. Never mind the theory, how are people actually winning business via Linkedin in the real world?

After working with Cisco Webex and guest blogging for them, they allowed Ian to run a poll in the Business Awards group asking people what they’d found to be the best way of winning new business via Linkedin.

There were 256 respondents. Of course, the results have an inbuilt bias as they’re not from the full Linkedin population, but from those who have participated in the Business Awards group. But they certainly give a good picture of the different ways people are actually using Linkedin effectively.

The Results: Just How Are People Using Linkedin to Win New Business?

The poll question asked was “What has been the best way you’ve found to win new business using Linkedin?”. Like all Linkedin polls, respondents were allowed to pick one answer only.

First up: Overall results from all respondents


That “Finding new connections” came out in 1st place is no surprise. The way Linkedin works makes it ideal for connecting with friends of friends. And that’s been the main focus of most of the advice given about how to get new clients through Linkedin: using search and asking other to refer you.

But what was a surprise for me was that “Reconnecting with old contacts” was only just a few percentage points behind it in 2nd place. Remember, the question wasn’t just about how you use Linkedin generally or for fun – it asked respondents about the best way they’d found to win new business. And nearly 30% of respondents were primarily getting new business from reaching out to old contacts they’d lost touch with.

When you think about it, this makes sense. Our old contacts (in the main) already know and trust us – whereas new connections don’t. And the obvious initial question “what are you doing now?” can lead to interesting follow-ups: “oh really, funny you should say that, we were looking for someone to…” or “actually, I know someone who is on the lookout for…”. Although this is not something that’s happened to me personally, a number of people I’ve spoken to have said this has worked well for them. the contacts they’ve reconnected with have often been in a position to pass on work to them.#

Linkedin’s pretty good at recommending names to reconnect with. And the more old contacts you connect with, the more it seems to recommend other, similar contacts.

So perhaps my biggest recommendation emerging from this survey is that if you want to use Linkedin to win new business, don’t just focus on trying to find new connections: look at re-establishing contact with some of your old colleagues and clients.

We offer bespoke training and/or consultancy to enhance your existing marketing strategy through effective use of Social Media.

If you need help in making Social Media and LinkedIn work for your business, give Helen a call at Coldicott Freelance Training on 01905 23902.

Monday 14 March 2011

How good are you at engaging customers online?

Which of the following attributes of an engaged customer has your organisation benefited from most in the past 12 months?

The graph shows the real benefits from companies who have engaged their customers online in the past 12 months. From getting new business referrals to clients being more tolerant of mistakes, they are all positives to increasing how clients deal with us.

Why?
  • Perhaps, customers who engage with businesses online and have been given the opportunity to voice and share their opinions feel more valued?
  • Perhaps, people feel companies who care about them and what they have to say, are worth doing business with?
  • Perhaps they feel by offering their experience of the particular product or service, this will be improved and they will benefit in the end.
  • Creating the opportunity to discuss products and services, means that we are focusing on quality, delivery, best practise and taking the focus away from just price.

Dave Chaffey, Marketing Insights recommends 5 practical measurements of online customer engagement, in comparison with other brands. He suggests 5 categories of measures:

  1. Reach. You can compare aggregate audience interactions on your own site against competitors using Google Trends or the Google Ad Planner. You can also review how many you reach offsite through blogs or social presence such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter communities.
  2. Engagement with site. This is where the new Google Analytics capabilities help. You can set hurdle rates for % of visits > 10 seconds, 5 pages or simply use the bounce rate as a basic measure.
  3. Activate to business goals. Activation is where you generate real business value such as a lead or a sale. Ultralase is a good example a site designed to maximise engagement to lead. All of the options on the left-hand side of the page such as call-me-backs and use of the forum can be setup as conversion goals in Google Analytics.

    Through setting up filters for social network presences you can see how customers originating from SNs generate sales and how engaged these audiences are.

  4. Participating to add value for your brand. Conversion goals can also be set up to show how many visitors bookmark, rate or share content.

  5. Loyalty. As my colleague Richard Sedley has emphasised, true engagement is about long-term loyalty, not a brief encounter with a web site on a first visit. Sedley defines engagement as Repeated interactions that strengthen the emotional, psychological or physical investment a customer has in a brand”.

    These repeated interactions are more difficult to measure in Google Analytics with other web analytics solutions such as Coremetrics offering more tools for analysis of Recency-Frequency and Monetary value through time for different customer segments.

    * If your company has already started measuring your customer engagement and would like to share a great measuring tool. Please let us know.

    * If you would like to share - how being able to comment on products, services, companies, brands makes you feel. Please let us know.

    * Coldicott Freelance Training helps companies to engage with their customers better, and we are always looking for more tips and advice to share with our customers. Please add your comments below...